One thing you have to acknowledge about Trump is that he understands the press so much better than the press understands him. He structures his presidential wins on the two-week theory – that’s the amount of time he knows that the news cycle, and the screen-addled attention of the American public, can be bothered to pay attention to any given topic. He learned this from his 14 seasons on The Apprentice, deep in the world of reality show producer Mark Burnett. The show, the episode, the season has to keep moving with new reveals and by lobbing bombs of surprise—or you lose the audience. In the first six months of his second term, American politics have become an unending season of Orange Lotus.

After the flash-bang pilot episode of Trump wrecking ball Elon Musk indiscriminately dismantling swathes of the federal government, we knew the narrative seeds were planted for a scene-chewing flameout later in the season.

Tariffs consumed more episodes than they should have, given the innate boredom with and incomprehension of the topic by most tuned-out Americans.

Branded as Liberation Day, the plotline had to be rushed out of the writers’ room prematurely after Signalgate, starring elite smart-ass and Atlantic editor-in-chief Jeffrey Goldberg, derailed the Trumpian narrative about a hand-picked cabinet of slick, camera-ready, lethally focused national security operatives. There wasn’t even time to get the usual flashy marketing touches in place as Trump held aloft what looked like a mid-management marketing board listing “reciprocal” tariff rates by country. The hasty list was so riddled with errors that it featured not just bad math, but islands inhabited only by penguins and seals, including what sounds like a MAGA destination for fast food tourists, McDonald Island. Trump wants to put the tariff turkey to bed this week, when he sends out a flurry of shakedown letters to all the penny-ante foreign powers who should now put up and shut up before the whole storyline jumps the shark.

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