For the past four years, David Roth’s writing on the machinations and hallucinations of the forty-fifth president of the United States has been a genre unto itself. Roth, a sportswriter by trade, covers the subject like no one else: I often find myself sending his essays to family members and other panicked acquaintances because in a climate where Trump’s every utterance is occasion for a new cycle of alarm, Roth reminds the reader that for all the damage the president is doing, he is not a mastermind, but rather, a television-addicted, attention-seeking moron.

Roth’s depiction of Trump’s motivations always ring true. As he writes of the president’s response to losing the election: “This is Trump going out exactly as he governed — by telling someone whose name he’d soon forget to fix a problem he didn’t care enough about to understand, and then watching television to see how well he was doing.”

Trump is a nightmarish creature, but a pathetic one, all vanity and ego.