Last week, President Donald Trump picked a fight with the NFL, arguing that players like Colin Kaepernick who take a knee during the national anthem should be fired. As he has done so many times before, the president kicked up a hornet’s nest of controversy. Maybe the commotion will work to his short-term political advantage. But whether it does or not, he has once again demonstrated how trivial our politics has become.

In his Vanity of Human Wishes, the first-century satirist Juvenal lamented that the citizens of Rome, who used to “grant power, high office, the legions, everything,” had become obsessed with just two things, “bread and circuses.” The people, he argued, had forsaken the duties of citizenship and cared only for spectacle. So it goes in early-21st-century America, with the president himself serving as circus master.