Updated at 12:08 a.m. ET on May 26, 2020.

COVID-19 has mounted a sustained attack on public life, especially indoor life. Many of the largest super-spreader events took place inside—at a church in South Korea, an auditorium in France, a conference in Massachusetts. The danger of the indoors is more than anecdotal. A Hong Kong paper awaiting peer review found that of 7,324 documented cases in China, only one outbreak occurred outside—during a conversation among several men in a small village. The risk of infection indoors is almost 19 times higher than in open-air environments, according to another study from researchers in Japan.

Appropriately, just about every public indoor space in America has been shut down or, in the case of essential businesses such as grocers, adapted for social-distancing restrictions. These closures have been economically ruinous, transforming large swaths of urban and suburban life into a morbid line of darkened windows.

You’d think Donald Trump would have more sympathy for looters, being a looter himself. The president has helped himself to money from the U.S. Treasury, using political power to direct public money to his personal businesses. It’s not as visual as a riot, but until 2017 it would have been regarded as equally criminal.

But no, he seems to think they deserve the death penalty: “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen,” he said on Twitter about the protesters in Minneapolis. “Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

If there were a way to watch Netflix’s new series Space Force without any of the dialogue, you might mistake it for a drama from happier times. The show’s score, which pops up intermittently in wafts of softly rousing strings and trumpets, seems to consciously evoke The West Wing; in one episode, it crescendos emphatically while a troupe of astronauts marches out from an aircraft hangar toward a shining gold horizon. The directors include significant names from the film world: Dee Rees (Mudbound) and Paul King (Paddington). Space Force’s set alone, which replicates a boondoggle of a U.S. military base in Colorado, is so sprawling and detailed and shiny that it feels like it should belong to a James Cameron movie, not a Greg Daniels workplace comedy. At a time when entertainment has adjusted to lo-fi spectacle—the Zoom sketch-comedy show, the TikTok satire, the art of performative bookshelving—the obvious expense of Space Force almost feels unseemly, even without the reported $10 million Steve Carell was paid to star in it.

Editor’s Note: This article is part of “Uncharted,” a series about the world we’re leaving behind, and the one being remade by the pandemic.

It’s Day One of the reopened future, and as people have always done when it’s time for a new start, you head to the gym. Well, hold on. We should begin before Day One, because you’ll actually have booked this time slot the week before. It’s good for 90 minutes. Don’t be late.

You grab a door handle wrapped in germ-repelling vinyl and walk inside. A Bluetooth-enabled beacon at the front desk recognizes your phone and checks you in. The receptionist takes your temperature and hands you a towel, plus a colored wristband that’ll help the staff remind you when it’s time to go. Hopefully you brought some water with you, because touchless bottle fillers have replaced the drinking fountains.

As the United States enters a pandemic summer, with more than 100,000 Americans already dead, and as tear gas engulfed Minneapolis last night, following protests after yet another killing of a black man by a police officer, the president tweeted that the “shooting starts” when the “looting starts.” The tweet echoed a historic line uttered by a police chief in Miami in 1967 during the civil-rights unrest that was also widely condemned at the time. Twitter hid that tweet behind a message saying that it was “glorifying violence”—a violation of the site’s terms of service—though users could still choose to view it by clicking through. All of this was an escalation of the seeming conflict between the president and Twitter: Just two days ago, the social-media company added a fact-check link to one of Donald Trump’s tweets for the first time. The president responded by issuing an executive order that is getting a lot of attention, but not the right kind.

So many mysteries surround Donald Trump: the contents of his tax returns, the apparent miracle of his graduation from college. Some of them are merely curiosities; others are of national importance, such as whether he understood the nuclear-weapons briefing given to every president. I prefer not to dwell on this question.

But since his first day as a presidential candidate, I have been baffled by one mystery in particular: Why do working-class white men—the most reliable component of Donald Trump’s base—support someone who is, by their own standards, the least masculine man ever to hold the modern presidency? The question is not whether Trump fails to meet some archaic or idealized version of masculinity. The president’s inability to measure up to Marcus Aurelius or Omar Bradley is not the issue. Rather, the question is why so many of Trump’s working-class white male voters refuse to hold Trump to their own standards of masculinity—why they support a man who behaves more like a little boy.

Overnight, protests of the egregious police killing of George Floyd roiled several American cities, including Minneapolis, where riots and looting frightened locals and destroyed livelihoods.

A prudent president would have urged calm.

On Twitter, President Donald Trump instead aggressively insulted elected officials in Minneapolis. “A total lack of leadership,” he wrote. “Either the very weak Radical Left Mayor, Jacob Frey, get his act together and bring the City under control, or I will send in the National Guard & get the job done right.”

Adam Serwer: Trump’s warped definition of free speech

Then Trump threatened to unleash American carnage on looters. “These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen,” he declared in a second tweet. “Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts.”

Tweets can be career-enders for the twits who post them. Remember the Taco Bell employee from 2012 who didn’t reckon it a firing offense to tweet a video of himself peeing onto a sumptuous heap of Nachos BellGrande. To no one’s surprise but his own, he reckoned wrong.

I’ve often wondered whether President Donald Trump, with his impulsive, counterproductive, inadvertently self-revealing tweets, could ever meet the same fate. The question was raised anew (by me) this week. It was a week shortened by the holiday, and Trump made fewer public statements than he does in a normal week. And so, away from the gaze of his admirers and the prying eyes of the press, he tweeted instead.

Seeing Trump exclusively through the prism of Twitter gives an incomplete picture, of course. It is best to take him in his totality as a public figure, not only on social media but also in the zig and zag of his press briefings, in his Oval Office Q&As, in the set-piece speeches with their mash-ups of scripted rhetoric and chaotic improvisation, in the answers shouted above the roar of Marine One. Yet Twitter isolates parts of his public approach to the world and throws them into sharp relief—useful to anyone more interested in understanding him than in hating or venerating him, if any such people are left after the past four years. (Anyone? Anyone?)

The Florida Keys are a place where deer stand next to children at school-bus stops. They lounge on lawns. They eat snacks right out of people’s hands. So when the deer began acting strangely in the summer of 2016, the people of the Keys noticed. Bucks started swinging their heads erratically, as if trying to shake something loose.

Then wounds opened on their heads—big, gaping wounds that exposed white slabs of bone. Something was eating the deer alive.

That something, lab tests would later confirm, was the New World screwworm, a parasite supposed to have been eradicated from the United States half a century ago. No one in the Keys had ever seen it. If you had asked an old-time Florida rancher though, he might have told you boyhood stories of similarly disfigured and dying cattle. In those days, screwworms found their way into cattle through any opening in the skin: the belly buttons of newborn calves, scratches from barbed wire, even a tick bite. Then they feasted.

Donald Trump has used Twitter to do many things: accuse a man of murder, incite insurrection, harass private citizens, block critics, lie about voting systems, threaten war crimes, promote unproven drug treatments, and divert attention from the 100,000 deaths of Americans on his watch. He has done all of this, and more, for years without the slightest interference by the platform. Even as he repeatedly violated Twitter’s rules and policies and the targets of his malicious campaigns pleaded for intervention, the social-media platform stood down.

But on Tuesday, Twitter did something it had never done before. It fact-checked Trump, or, more precisely, it added a small label with an exclamation point and the words “Get the facts about mail-in ballots” to two of Trump’s tweets that contained false claims about voter fraud. Clicking on the label leads to a Twitter announcement headlined “Trump makes unsubstantiated claim that mail-in ballots will lead to voter fraud.”