Let us pause the various constitutional crises, geopolitical showdowns, and DOGE dramas to make a simple observation: Donald Trump seems kind of busy, no?

In recent days, he kicked off what the media have dubbed “Tariff Week” by declaring Sunday, February 9, Gulf of America Day. This occurred as he flew to New Orleans to become the first-ever sitting U.S. president to attend the Super Bowl and just before Fox News aired a Super Bowl Sunday/Gulf of America Day interview, a presidential news-making tradition that Joe Biden had blown off the past two years, in which Trump, among other things, (1) reiterated that Canada should become the 51st U.S. state, (2) declined to endorse Vice President J. D. Vance as his successor (“but he’s very capable”), and (3) referred to Gaza as a “demolition site.”

Trump spent much of the afternoon and evening getting fussed over by billionaires, celebrities, and other dignitaries in front of 127.7 million viewers, during the most watched television broadcast in history. He received mostly cheers when his ubiquitous mug was shown on the Caesars Superdome big screen before the game, which he watched with his daughter Ivanka and NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell from a 50-yard-line suite. He closed out his weekend by stirring up bad blood with Kamala Harris supporter Taylor Swift via Truth Social (“BOOED out of the Stadium”) and ordering his Treasury secretary to terminate the bipartisan menace of the penny.

[Read: A Super Bowl spectacle over the gulf]

After a brief overnight respite, the Trump-centric events kept hurtling forth in a flurry of perpetual motion—also known as Monday and Tuesday. Trump imposed 25 percent duties on all steel and aluminum imports; pardoned former Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich; and threatened that “all hell is gonna break out” if Hamas does not release all Israeli hostages by Saturday at noon. He signed an executive order that calls for a halt to all federal purchases of those flaccid paper straws (which, let’s face it, are as annoying as pennies), and another directing all federal agencies to cooperate with Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency to “significantly” reduce the federal workforce. This came a few hours after he held an Oval Office meeting with Jordan’s King Abdullah II in which the president reasserted, in reference to Gaza, “We’re going to take it, we’re going to hold it, we’re going to cherish it.”

In summation: Yes, Trump definitely does seem kind of busy.

Opinions, of course, vary about whether this is a good or a catastrophic kind of busy. And for what it’s worth, several federal judges have declared themselves hostile to Trump’s executive orders. Regardless, these rapid-fire feedings of attention-seizing fodder represent a fundamental ethic of Trump 2.0: Frenetic action—or at least the nonstop impression thereof—seems very much the point. And notwithstanding the whiplash, turbulence, and contradiction of it all, people seem to like it so far.

In a CBS News/YouGov poll released Sunday, 53 percent of the 2,175 U.S. adults surveyed said that they approved of the job Trump is doing, a higher share than at any point in his first go-round. Perhaps more revealing, the poll’s respondents described these first weeks of the 78-year-old president’s term as “energetic,” “focused,” and “effective.” They might not necessarily approve of what Trump has been energetic, focused, and effective about doing (pardoning the January 6 perpetrators, for example) or not doing (66 percent said Trump hasn’t paid enough attention to lowering prices for goods and services). But Trump has created a sense of action, commotion, disruption, and maybe even destruction that many voters seem to welcome for now. At the very least, there is nothing sleepy about any of this.

“He said he was going to do something, and he’s doing it,” one woman told a Bulwark focus group of Biden-turned-Trump voters conducted in the days after Trump returned to the White House. At this point, the fact of this “something” seems to be trumping the substance of it. The woman said she works in clinical research at a hospital and interacts with people who might lose National Institutes of Health grants to Trump and Musk’s barrage of cuts; she described a work environment that has been thrown into chaos.

“Like, what do we do? We have no idea, the CEO has no idea. We’re confused a little bit,” the woman said. “I’m not saying it’s the right move, the wrong move,” she added. “But it’s definitely like, Something’s happening. He’s actually doing something.”

[Read: The strategy behind Trump’s policy blitz]

Sarah Longwell, the Bulwark publisher who runs the focus groups, told me that Trump appears to be benefiting from “Joe Biden’s complete lack of communication” during his time in office. Longwell said she repeatedly heard from voters that they had no idea what Biden wanted to do in office, or what he was doing. “He created this huge vacuum of presidential communication that Trump is now filling,” Longwell said.

She added that Biden also presents a cautionary example of how a president’s initial popularity can be fleeting. Four years ago, at this same point, voters were sounding quite appreciative of having someone in office who was not constantly in their faces. Biden was seen as restoring “normalcy” after the tumultuous, COVID-dominated, and violent end of Trump’s first term. He polled in the low 60s in a March 2021 CBS survey, was still getting compared to Franklin D. Roosevelt, and enjoyed a popularity that would last until the summer of 2021, when Afghanistan went south and inflation headed north.

A hallmark of presidential honeymoons is that presidents tend to look better when they act in ways that contrast with their predecessor, especially when their predecessor was unpopular. Another hallmark of those honeymoon periods: They tend not to last. In other words, Trump should cherish this while he can—or until all hell breaks out and people start pining again for normalcy.

Tom Brady is the greatest quarterback in NFL history (for now). He is not the greatest NFL broadcaster of all time (for now). So why is he calling the Super Bowl tonight, and why is Fox Sports paying him $375 million over 10 years—more than any other broadcaster in sports history—as if his excellence in the former job automatically qualifies him for the latter?

By the simplest conventional analysis, Brady’s initial returns make the contract look like a bad bet. His performance in the booth has received mixed reviews, to put things charitably. In a season when NFL ratings have declined overall, they fell more for games on Fox than on CBS, and more people tuned in to CBS on average to watch football than to watch Brady’s late-afternoon slot. In fairness, as Austin Karp at Sports Business Journal pointed out, the games on CBS this year happened to be closer in the fourth quarter, and many people watching Fox might have clicked away because the outcome was a foregone conclusion.

Applying any normal ROI analysis to Brady’s contract is difficult for at least four reasons: He is not a normal person, “celebrity sports broadcaster” is not a normal job, the NFL is not a normal industry, and televised football is not a normal business.

For starters, Tom Brady is … uh, Tom Brady. (Yes, this is the high-quality analysis you come to The Atlantic for.) He is the GOAT of quarterbacks by conventional career statistics; he is also the most decorated quarterback in NFL history by championships, a part-owner of an NFL franchise, one of the most famous people in the world, and one of the most annoyingly handsome people alive. If you want somebody with this résumé (or, frankly, even trace elements of this résumé) to commit to working with you for a substantial period of time, you’re going to part with a gargantuan amount of cash.

[Read: How the economists took over the NBA]

Even when they’re not all-time talents with supermodel jawlines, NFL broadcasters are paid like kings. Al Michaels, the legendary play-by-play guy with Amazon, is reportedly paid $15 million annually. So is the nearly-as-legendary Joe Buck, at ESPN. Tony Romo, the former Dallas Cowboys quarterback who provides occasionally oracular commentary for CBS, gets closer to $17 million a year. At $37.5 million a year, Brady’s salary seems eye-bleedingly high compared with basically any job, but in the context of other famous commentators, his salary is merely eye-watering.

Nor is Brady just an NFL broadcast personality; he’s a celebrity NFL broadcaster. Celebrity television hosts are mascots, emcees, and gold-plated utility players. For example, Jimmy Kimmel is not only paid handsomely to host a late-night show; he’s also well known within Disney for being the ultimate team player who’s game to schmooze a big advertiser in a pinch or to host the Disney “upfronts,” where the networks show off their upcoming programming to advertisers and media. Fox Sports can theoretically use Brady in a similar way. For their latest IndyCar promotional campaign, Fox taped a short cameo with Brady joking about his jawline. How much marginal ad revenue will the Fox Sports analytics department assign to that one Brady spot? I have no idea, but the very possibility of being able to deploy Tom Frickin’ Brady as a corporate asset is worth an amount of money that exceeds his immediate value as a broadcaster.

There’s another way that Brady’s value to Fox Sports might be greater off-camera than on. Ratings seem more sensitive to the quality of the matchup than to the quality of the commentary from the broadcast booth. At a time when the NFL is trying to expand to streaming—sending Thursday games to Amazon and Christmas games to Netflix—Fox needs every edge it can get to negotiate the best games. Brady, who might be able to leverage his deep connections to the league in a pinch, is the rarest asset. He helps Fox present its broadcast to the league in terms that no other network can match: “We have the GOAT. They don’t.”

[Read: A fake yellow line changed football forever]

Football bestrides American culture like nothing else. It is the last vestige of the defunct 20th-century mainstream and the keystone to the entire multi-hundred-billion-dollar cable bundle. Last year, the NFL accounted for 72 of the 100 most watched television broadcasts. The previous year, football accounted for 93 of the top 100. (Election coverage and an unusually high-profile World Series accounted for almost all of the difference.) Every year, Fox Sports spends about $2 billion every year for the rights to broadcast NFL games. Tom Brady’s contract is less than 2 percent of that annual licensing fee. Because protecting the relationship with the NFL is worth tens of billions of dollars, an understandable calculation from Fox Sports could be: Does it really make sense to play moneyball with the NFL, or should we just suck it up and pay a 2 percent GOAT tax to guarantee that the most famous person from the most important cultural industry is ours for the next decade, as streaming giants threaten to crash the gates?

Look at it one way, and Tom Brady is paid almost $40 million a year to provide a television service that doesn’t seem to actually drive television viewership. But look at it another way, and you can see Brady as a corporate mascot, a brand-marketing tool, a break-glass-in-case-of-emergency asset, and an affordable “tip” to pay the NFL on top of its licensing deal to secure the best football matchups, which actually do drive viewership.

To judge by the shelves of America’s vice merchants, the nation is in the grips of a whipped-cream frenzy. Walk into any vape store or sex shop, and you’ll find canisters of nitrous oxide showcased in window displays—ostensibly to catch the eye of bakers and baristas, who use the gas to aerate creams and foams. At the bodega near my apartment, boxes of up to 100 mini-canisters are piled up to eye level, next to Baby Yoda bongs.

In fact, culinary professionals generally don’t shop for equipment at stores with names like Puff N Stuff or Condom Sense. The true clientele inhales the gas to get high. A dangerous and technically illegal drug, nitrous oxide is widely available as long as everyone pretends it’s destined for use as a food product. Indeed, a whole industry appears to have built its business model around exploiting this loophole. Large distributors brand and flavor nitrous in ways that attract young inhalers, stock it with retailers catering to other vices, and sell it in quantities that are implausible for culinary use but ideal for huffing. The gas can even be ordered from Walmart, Amazon, and eBay. Without meaningful regulation, getting high on nitrous will remain as convenient as picking up a bag of chips.

Nitrous oxide has been recreationally inhaled since the 1800s. It induces a euphoric head rush and tingling in the user’s fingers and toes, often followed by giddy laughter. Almost as soon as it starts, it’s over. The effects of a single hit typically last for less than a minute.

The modern version of the drug, known colloquially as a “whippet” or “whip-it,” has recently climbed the youth-popularity ranks. (These products are distinct from the Reddi-Wip cans found at the supermarket, which contain cream and nitrous oxide together. The canisters proliferating now contain the gas alone.) Although pandemic-era lockdown protocols hampered illicit drugs’ supply chains, nitrous oxide remained broadly available by comparison. In 2018, about 12.5 million Americans over age 12 reported having ever used it, a number that rose to nearly 14 million in 2022. Social media is full of clips of young people ripping hits before falling on their faces (so much so that TikTok eventually banned nitrous-related search terms). Fans of the drug have created gas-tank accessories in the video game Roblox; one rapper’s song “Whippet” features him and his entourage ripping hits of nitrous from tanks tucked in their waistbands between verses. A recent Columbia graduate told me that, back in college, one friend’s birthday party featured a salad bowl “full to the brim” with used nitrous canisters. (He spoke on condition of anonymity in order to discuss illegal drug use.)

[Malcolm Ferguson: Marijuana is too strong now]

As you might imagine, depriving your brain of oxygen in favor of laughing gas is not wise. Heavy nitrous users can suffer severe health consequences, including, occasionally, death. Varun Vohra, an emergency-medicine professor at Wayne State University, in Detroit, told me that heavy users experience symptoms including irregular walking, bodily weakness, and severe limb pain. (Nitrous-oxide-related emergency-room visits in Michigan more than doubled from 2022 to 2023.) Inhaling the gas deactivates vitamin B12, which harms nerves in the brain and the spinal cord. Among chronic users, this can eventually induce paralysis. Users also report depression, anxiety, mood swings, and even hallucination. A senior at Tulane University, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, told me that he’d quit the drug after one night when he took a deep inhale and blacked out. He awoke on the floor a few seconds later, unable to remember what had happened; his friends told him he’d had a seizure.

Perhaps the greatest danger arises from what people do while huffing the drug. Ed Scott, a city-council member in Rialto, California, told me that his son, Myles, died in a car accident after his friend inhaled the gas while driving and passed out at the wheel. This inspired Scott to investigate the drug’s use in California. He told me that he found many other fatal car accidents in which nitrous-oxide products were discovered at crash sites but police—who thought they were helium cannisters—did not register the crashes as DUIs.

Given the health and safety risks, the sale and use of nitrous oxide for recreational purposes is technically illegal. The key word here is technically. Businesses can generally get away with selling nitrous oxide over the counter as long as they say it’s for culinary use—and pretend not to know what customers are really doing with it. (Some states prohibit sales to anyone under 21 or 18.) If, that is, they even bother pretending. The Tulane senior told me that the clerks at his local smoke shop greeted him with shouts of “whip-it boy!” when he visited to restock.

A major industry has grown out of the regulatory vacuum. In 2020, Marissa Politte’s family sued United Brands, the Silicon Valley–based company that distributes the brand Whip-It!, after she was killed by an unconscious nitrous-huffing driver. Documents revealed by the lawsuit suggest that the players involved know they’re benefiting from a legal loophole. A former warehouse employee estimated that three-quarters of United Brands’ customers were smoke shops, not bakeries or cafés. The client list named retailers including Mary Jane’z Novelties, Herban Legend Smoke Shop, Smoke 420, and Precious Slut 1. In a seven-year span, documents show, the company sold about 52,000 “chargers,” or miniature nitrous capsules, to Kaldi’s Coffee—and more than 1 million to the It’s A Dream smoke shop.

Internal emails between United Brands and retailers, uncovered by the lawsuit, suggest a certain cynicism around legal compliance. One United Brands employee emailed a retailer requesting that the Whip-It! chargers “are used properly and legally.” The retailer responded: “yah man we know the deal we put a disclaimer… you know we all got to cover our asses, better safe than sorry.” (United Brands did not respond to multiple requests for comment.)

Meanwhile, many other companies market nitrous in ways that seem conspicuously ill-tailored to professional pastry chefs. A variety of gas tanks are sold with names that evoke marijuana strains, not whipped cream—Monster Gas (slogan: “Become easy, Become happy!”), Hippie Whippy, Baking Bad, Cosmic Gas—and in flavors such as mango smoothie and tropical punch. Colorful labels feature fruits, unicorns, women in bathing suits, or sports cars. (Hervé Malivert, the director of culinary affairs at the Institute of Culinary Education, told me that many food professionals are loyal to iSi chargers, which they order from the company’s website—not at a gas station. Malivert said he has never heard of a chef using flavored gas or gas tanks.)

One of the most prominent nitrous companies is Galaxy Gas, which was founded in 2021 by three brothers who ran Cloud 9, an Atlanta-based smoke-shop chain. A Cloud 9 executive told New York magazine that Galaxy Gas at one time made up nearly 30 percent of all nitrous sales nationwide. Asked by CBS to explain why anyone would need to buy a tank with enough nitrous oxide to make thousands of servings of whipped cream, a Galaxy Gas spokesperson claimed that the product was for customers seeking an “erotic culinary lubricant.” (The company’s rising profile in the world of whip-its has brought legal scrutiny. According to New York, its trademark was recently sold for $1 to a newly registered corporate owner, and it has paused direct sales. Galaxy Gas did not respond to requests for comment.)

[Mike Riggs: Congress accidentally legalized weed six years ago]

In response to the spread of nitrous-oxide use, states and the federal government have begun taking steps toward more effective regulation. The most notable example is Louisiana, where the drug used to be outlawed only if sold for the purpose of being inhaled. Legislation enacted last May made its sale presumptively illegal, with carveouts for genuine industrial and culinary use. Jeanette Brick, the president of iSi North America, told me that her company does not oppose the Louisiana law. “These laws are intended to prevent misuse, and they have not negatively impacted our ability to serve the culinary community in the state,” she said in an email. She also noted that “iSi does not sell large tanks of nitrous oxide, as they have no culinary application and are increasingly associated with misuse. We strongly advocate for additional restrictions on these large tanks to help curb their growing misuse among teenagers.”   

Outside Louisiana, however, legislative efforts have yet to deliver significant change. In 2017, for example, then–California State Senator Jim Nielsen proposed a bill to ban nitrous-oxide sales in stores selling tobacco or tobacco-related products. Industry lobbyists opposed the bill, and it eventually failed to pass.

In the absence of effective regulation, litigation has emerged as the best tool to achieve accountability. In 2023, a Missouri jury found United Brands liable for conspiring to sell nitrous oxide as a drug. The company was ordered to pay $720 million to Marissa Politte’s family for her wrongful death. The novel jury verdict and the large court-mandated payout might set a lasting precedent. “You have companies whose full-time scheme it is to pour this stuff onto our streets,” Johnny Simon, the Politte family’s attorney, told me. “That’s who we need to go after.”

Still, case-by-case litigation can push only so hard against countervailing market forces. Nor should it have to, when the blueprint for lifesaving regulation exists. Had something like Nielsen’s California bill been federal law in 2020, Politte might still be alive. The driver who killed her bought his nitrous oxide from a smoke shop.