Standing in front of the historic St. Johns Episcopal Church on H Street across from the White House, President Donald Trump held a Bible in his hand like one of his patented Trump Steaks. The church, which every president since James Madison has attended at least once, suffered minor damage after a fire was set amid protests in response to the killing of George Floyd by Minneapolis police. Its a Bible, Trump said as he shifted the book into different positions for the photographers.

The cameras had followed him from the White House, where hed delivered an address to the American public, promising to send the U.S. military into states that did not deploy an overwhelming law enforcement presence to end protests, whether governors asked for troops or not.

In order for Trump to be able to walk to the church and to provide a backing track for his menacing speech National Guardsmen opened fire with tear gas, flash-bang grenades and pepper pellets on a peaceful demonstration just outside the White House. Protesters were gathered in Lafayette Park to plead for the president and others to stop police brutality and anti-Black racism; instead, they wound up being pushed off the street by military police on horseback and driving back by tear gas well before the citys 7 p.m. curfew.

All so Trump could get the perfect image to show hes not hiding in a bunker as America is in crisis.

Staging presentations for television is what the president does. Trump, who played upon his image as a successful businessman on a reality TV show before becoming president, does not see himself as anything but the lead actor in a drama about himself. He does not see the world as anything but a set. World leaders are supporting actors. The rest of us are extras. He gasses us and sets the military against us to color the background of his speeches. Our cries are just off-camera background. The same president boasted about TV ratings of his White House coronavirus briefings as more than 100,000 Americans died of COVID-19, showing that human lives arent as important as his image.

He does this because this is who he is and only who he is. The only way to explain him, therefore, is through the screen.

Trumps career as a real estate mogul and cosmopolitan Manhattan playboy launched just as television had conquered American news and with it the American mind in the mid-1970s. The destructive intrusion into the news business by corporate executives is best captured in the brilliant 1976 film Network, written by Paddy Chayefsky, in which unscrupulous executives ride the ratings success of their storied newscasters mental breakdown until he causes them too much trouble and they have him assassinated by similarly unscrupulous left-wing radicals.