As Donald Trump neared the end of his contentious Oval Office exchange with Ukrainian president Volodymyr Zelenskyy, he almost absent-mindedly revealed his made-for-TV approach to the presidency, telling the assembled press, “This is going to be great television.”

Everything about Trump’s time in politics, from the moment he descended that escalator to announce his candidacy to his “casting” of Cabinet positions based on their telegenic qualities, has reinforced that premise: That Trump, as a heavy consumer of TV and one-time reality star, sees everything through the lens of the “show” he’s producing.

Indeed, if the 1998 movie “The Truman Show” focused on a man blithely oblivious (at first, anyway) to the fact his entire existence featured him as the star of a TV show, “The Trump Show” is its polar opposite — a spectacle almost painfully aware, at all times, of the cameras, and how he perceives it unfolding through the prism of a screen.