Late Tuesday evening, with the US government shutdown clock ticking down under four hours, Donald Trump showed Americans how seriously he takes the job of governing. And also how seriously he takes American democracy.

At 8:30 PM on September 30, Trump posted a trio of pictures to his social media platform depicting an Oval Office meeting between himself and congressional leaders.

For the occasion, he placed red hats teasing a third term on the Resolute Desk next to glasses of what appeared to be Diet Coke. They were positioned in front of Hakeem Jeffries and Chuck Schumer.

In all three of the pictures, Trump’s photographer made the hats the focal point, which is to say Trump’s first (and probably only) priority in the meeting was ensuring proper placement of provocative stage props — jesting allusions to the idea that he intends to stay in power indefinitely.

And so it was that the desk under which John F. Kennedy Jr. once played while his father tended to the business of the people now serves as a propaganda counter for Trump to taunt his political rivals and troll America with the threat of a(nother) coup.

If you want to roll your eyes and call that assessment needlessly melodramatic, I won’t blame you. I’d probably do the same if someone else wrote it. And to be fair, a lot of unseemly things have happened around that desk, some of them far more indecorous than any of Trump’s petulant publicity stunts (albeit none more anathema to the country’s founding than the suggestion that term limits no longer apply, joke or not).

My point is just that Trump’s not serious about governing and never has been. Everything he touches he insults and cheapens. Even when he doesn’t mean to. American democracy’s no different.

I’m compelled to mention the same caveat I always bring up whenever there’s a shutdown (the fact that I have an editorial playbook for shutdowns says a lot about how dysfunctional American government really is): Congress’s public approval rating has averaged just 27% looking back to 1974. The nadir was — and try not to laugh — 9% in November of 2013.

As the figure shows, there’s only one print north of 80% in the entire Gallup time series: October of 2001. That says a lot, doesn’t it? In order for an overwhelming majority of US voters to rally around their elected officials, a jihadist had to fly jumbo jets into America’s landmarks.

You could argue the sample window biases that time series. After all, it starts during the stagflationary 1970s and includes the Iraq War and the GFC. But… well, that’s modern history, isn’t it? What window are we supposed to use? 1866-1961? And besides, the 1990s arguably marked “peak America.” Things were pretty good in the US during the 90s. But even then, there were only two congressional approval ratings north of 50%.

There isn’t enough time in the day for an exhaustive account of that phenomenon, but suffice to say each and every incremental example of dysfunction, including and especially long government shutdowns, serves to validate the public’s perception that the country’s legislature is inept.

Recall that Trump owns the longest government shutdown in history: A 35-day funding gap from December 21, 2018 to January 25, 2019, as illustrated above.

Ironically — and unfortunately — this shutdown could actually bolster Trump to the extent he can frame it as an indictment of a broken system and, implicitly, an argument for a centralized power structure that vests important decisions, including those around spending, in the executive.

That’s a more nuanced version of the cruder argument against democracy advanced by autocrats all over the world: It’s an inefficient form of government that can result in dangerous paralysis.

Trump openly admitted this week that he intends to use the shutdown to consolidate power if it goes on long enough. He was predictably forthright about that. “A lot of good can come from shutdowns,” he said, during the Tuesday evening Oval Office meeting. “We can get rid of a lot of things that we didn’t want, and they’d be Democrat things.”

It’s not funny. But then again it kinda is. How can you not laugh at that? It’s another example of Trump’s tried-and-true strategy for subverting American democracy: If you say it out loud, it’s fine. It’s the same thing with the 2028 hats on the Resolute Desk. And with social media messages threatening to invade and conquer Chicago. As long as you put it out there publicly, it’s not unconstitutional and it’s not a conspiracy. Because if it were, you wouldn’t say it publicly. Right?

Wrong. It’s obviously unconstitutional and it’s obviously a conspiracy, where “it” is the second Trump presidency and everything to do with it (he shouldn’t have been allowed on the ballot and Project 2025 is basically just Viktor Orban’s blueprint for illiberalism). And yet he continues to get away with anything and everything, and there’s no evidence that’s going to change.

For whatever it’s worth, the figure below shows you the share of workers furloughed by department. The total on Wednesday afternoon was something like 585,000.

JD Vance confirmed that actual layoffs are coming “if the shutdown continues,” although he wasn’t as adamant as Trump about plans to leverage the funding gap to go after “Democrat things.”

For her part, Karoline Leavitt said layoffs will likely start in “two days.” Russell Vought, in a call with congressional Republicans, said more or less the same thing. According to reports, he also alluded to the idea that any job cuts will target bureaucratic departments seen as out of step with Trump’s priorities for the country.

Most of the shutdown coverage I saw on Wednesday suggested a lot of Americans still can’t see the forest for the trees. Sure, the specific policy disagreements matter, but from a big-picture perspective, this is another manufactured emergency. Yet again, Trump’s created a situation where the normal functioning of government is suspended.

Autocrats thrive in such voids. Because they can cite the exigent circumstances as an excuse to do whatever they want to do. In this case, that’ll mean firing even more federal workers, creating even more room to re-staff the bureaucracy with loyalists or simply leave it gutted such that it can’t function as a technocratic, passive check on Trump’s social reengineering program.

During an event in Manhattan on Wednesday, New York governor Kathy Hochul noted that the Statue of Liberty’s torch “could literally go dark” in the days ahead, “not because of an act of God or a horrific storm or a flood or hurricane, but because Donald Trump and Republicans in Washington forced a government shutdown.”

It scarcely matters. That torch went dark figuratively in November of 2016. And if the hats on the Resolute Desk Tuesday evening were any indication, it’s gonna stay dark for a helluva long time to come.