Maybe you’re reading this article while listening to a podcast. Or you’re participating in a dull Zoom meeting. Or you’re talking on the phone with a relative.

Maybe you’ve just read the first three lines of this article three times without really registering them because your attention is absorbed elsewhere.

The modern age, with its multiple demands on a person’s time, seems to require multitasking. It’s not the kind of activity you read about in the classics. Surely that fellow who ran from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens in 490 BC didn’t carry along a couple papyrus scrolls to read along the way. Leonardo da Vinci didn’t paint Mona Lisa’s smile, stop to conduct a scientific experiment on gravity, and simultaneously jot down his thoughts on anatomy, going back and forth among those activities like a whirling dervish.

Though it promises greater productivity, multitasking is not a wondrous invention. Shifting between tasks, according to a number of psychological studies, actually reduces productivity and generates more errors. The result can be banal, as in, “I’m sorry, could you repeat what you just said to me?” Or it can be fatal, as in the thousands of deaths caused by drivers looking at their phones.

It’s hard to imagine Donald Trump multitasking, unless you count sleeping during cabinet meetings, lying and walking at the same time, or eating Whoppers while dispersing them on social media. And yet, his administration has been extremely effective its first year doing multiple things at the same time, if you define “effective” in terms of lives lost, reputations ruined, and institutions destroyed.

Don’t mistake all this destruction for multitasking. The effort to keep all the spinning plates aloft is something pursued, however spuriously, in the service of greater productivity. Instead, let’s call what the Trump administration is doing “multitrashing.” Imagine a bully that pushes the magician out of the way so that all the plates come........

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