President Donald Trump believed deeply in two things: decisive military action and his own reflection. The first he expressed through policy. The second he expressed through the mirrored ceiling installed in the private presidential gym, which had been justified to Congress as a “situational awareness enhancement.”

On Tuesday morning he approved an airstrike before finishing breakfast. “Sir, the intelligence confidence is approximately sixty percent,” said the national security advisor. Trump buttered his toast. “Sixty percent is basically a B-minus,” he said. “I was a B-minus student and look how I turned out.”

Everyone in the Situation Room nodded. Nodding was a core competency in the administration. By noon, three mountain villages had been converted into statistics. By two, the communications office had converted the statistics into a phrase. “Precision stability operation." By four, the networks were running patriotic music under footage of fighter jets and by evening the president was bored.

Power, Trump had discovered, was thrilling for the first few years. After that it became administrative. Every door opened before you reached it. Every conversation ended with someone calling you “sir.” Even the scandals grew repetitive. Take the allegations for example. Every six months a new article appeared suggesting the president had behaved inappropriately with someone young, vulnerable, or employed by him. The articles were always accompanied by phrases like” disturbing pattern” and “credible claims.” Trump’s legal team preferred the phrase “historical misunderstandings.”

“What people don’t understand,” he once told a donor dinner, “is that charisma is a heavy burden.” The donors laughed because the wine was expensive.

That evening, after a long day of protecting democracy from foreign villages, Trump retired to his private study where a small glass jar waited on the desk. The jar had arrived in a diplomatic pouch from an old college acquaintance who had since become what cable news called “a controversial consciousness theorist. “Inside the pouch was a note, the note said “Timothy Leary called this a heroic dose. You should try meeting yourself.”

Trump snorted. He had met himself many times. Usually on magazine covers. Still, the presidency had grown dull. He had already tried golf, war, and social media feuds. He opened the jar. Inside were dried mushrooms that looked like something a raccoon might reject. “Heroic dose,” he muttered.

Donald Trump had never turned down anything described as heroic. He swallowed them with a glass of presidential scotch. For twenty minutes nothing happened. He checked his phone. Three approval ratings had risen. One senator had apologized to him publicly for something Trump had said. A television host had described him as “a once-in-a-century leader.”

Then the walls began breathing. Trump frowned at them. “Stop that,” he said.

The walls ignored him. The carpet began flowing like a lazy river. The portraits of former presidents leaned toward him as if they had finally been waiting long enough to speak. Abraham Lincoln sighed. “Another one,” Lincoln said. Trump blinked. “You’re dead,” Trump informed him. “Yes,” Lincoln replied. “You’ll see why that’s relevant later.” The room folded.

Suddenly Trump was standing in a desert village he vaguely recognized from a briefing slideshow labeled “low-complexity target environment.” A boy ran past him carrying a metal pot. Somewhere a drone hummed. Trump tried to issue a command but discovered he was the boy. He felt the boy’s ribs when he breathed. Then the sky exploded. The experience lasted less than a second. It lasted forever. The world folded again. Now Trump sat in a drone control room thousands of miles away, holding a joystick and chewing gum while a supervisor said, “Command authority confirmed.”

Then he was a mother digging through dust. Then he was a soldier filling out paperwork. Then he was a journalist trying to verify the name of a village that no longer existed. Trump returned to the Oval Office screaming. Except it wasn’t the Oval Office anymore. The room had filled with people. Hundreds of them.

A young intern he remembered only because she had once avoided elevators with him stood near the desk. A marine missing an arm leaned against a bookshelf. A man held a photograph of a daughter Trump had never met. None of them shouted. They simply looked at him. Trump straightened his tie. “Now see here,” he said, attempting a presidential tone, “I am the leader of the free world.” A voice answered from somewhere behind his skull.

“Without the job title, who are you?”

Trump opened his mouth. Nothing came out. The title dissolved first. Then the speeches. Then the campaign slogans. Then the idea that he was the main character of the universe. His sense of self collapsed like a luxury condo built on sand. For a brief and horrifying eternity, Donald Trump experienced what philosophers call “ego death” and what campaign strategists call “a messaging disaster.”

He became everything. The drone operator. The civilian. The voter. The intern. The critic. The frightened child hiding under a desk during one of his rallies. Millions of perspectives poured through him at once until the concept of “President Donald Trump” shrank to roughly the size of a confused hamster.

At the center of the storm came a realization so obvious it was unbearable: Every person he had treated like scenery had been living a full life. The universe, it turned out, was not a stage for President Donald Trump. It was full of other people. Trump collapsed.

He awoke at dawn on the carpet, covered in sweat and existential dread. His chief of staff walked in. “Sir,” she said carefully, “the security council meets in twenty minutes.”

Trump stared at his hands. For the first time in his life they looked small. “I think,” he said slowly, “I may have misunderstood… everything.” His chief of staff wrote this down because it sounded like a quote.

Three hours later the president stood before cameras. “My fellow citizens,” he began. Reporters leaned forward. “I regret to inform you that after consuming what experts describe as a heroic dose of hallucinogenic mushrooms, I have realized I am not the center of the universe.”

The room went silent.

“Furthermore,” he continued, “I have committed numerous acts of war, cruelty, and arrogance that now seem… extremely bad.” Cable news broke into twelve panels simultaneously. “I am resigning the presidency,” Trump said, “and will spend the remainder of my life attempting to repair the damage I have done, which preliminary calculations suggest may require several centuries.”

A reporter raised a hand. “Mr. President, are you saying psychedelic mushrooms caused this decision?” Trump thought for a moment.

“No,” he said. “They merely removed the excuses.”

He stepped away from the podium. Behind him, advisors fainted. Markets collapsed. Commentators debated whether empathy was constitutional.

And somewhere, deep in the quiet corners of the world Donald Trump had never bothered to imagine before, people continued living their complicated lives, entire universes that had never required a president to exist at all.