Sooner or later Trump will convince himself that the inconvenient virus (which he will simultaneously blame Democrats for and dismiss as overhyped) prevented him from talking to the American people about impeachment, and, more specifically, about his big beautiful acquittal in the Senate. This is a chance he feels he was owed, and we are not talking about a man who denies himself the things he believes are his. Eventually, regardless of what basic economic indicators suggest, Trump will start talking about how Quid Pro Joe and Low IQ Maxine Waters and Leakin’ James Comey and That Woman in Michigan exaggerated coronavirus, a.k.a., Impeachment 2.0, and dragged the country down into a second Great Depression all at the behest of High Crime Nancy and Chuck Schumer (who, oddly enough, has never received a Trumpian sobriquet). He will talk again about drugs and immigration and crime. He will insist that the special counsel investigation and impeachment prevented him from building the wall and fundamentally remaking the nature of our trade relationship with China. He will give himself credit for taking a hard line with protesters that his campaign insists was actually the meekest forbearance. He will also almost certainly hold more of his trademark carnivalesque rallies, upon whose energy he seems to feed.

Trump will not abandon American carnage for the very simple reason that American carnage seems not to have abandoned him. The quasi-apocalyptic atmosphere of the last several months seems in many ways to be fulfilling the dreams of his enemies about what life would look like under a Trump administration. They will ignore at their peril the reality that at one time these were probably his ideal governing conditions as well.