In the disquieting new film “Eddington,” the director, Ari Aster, captures the American tendency to live obsessively in the present. As a Covid-era New Mexico town tears itself apart over mask mandates, Black Lives Matter and conspiracy theories, a faceless conglomerate constructs a data center nearby — a physical manifestation of our tech-dominated future. It’s an unsubtle message: Short-term compulsions blind us to the forces remaking our lives.

In the chaos depicted, Donald Trump is both offscreen and omnipresent. Over the decade that he has dominated our politics, he has been both a cause and a symptom of the unraveling of our society. His rise depended upon the marriage of unbridled capitalism and unregulated technology, which allowed social media to systematically demolish our attention spans and experience of shared reality. And he embodied a culture in which money is ennobling, human beings are brands, and the capacity to be shamed is weakness.

Today, his takeover of our national psyche appears complete. As “Eddington” excruciatingly reminds us, the comparatively moderate first Trump administration ended in a catastrophically mismanaged pandemic, mass protests and a violent insurrection. The fact that he returned to power even after those calamities seemed to confirm his instinct that America has become an enterprise with a limitless margin for error, a place where individuals — like superpowers — can avoid the consequences of their actions. “Many people thought it was impossible for me to stage such a historic political comeback,” he said in his Inaugural Address. “But as you see today, here I am.”

Here I am. The implicit message? When we looked at Mr. Trump onstage, we saw ourselves.

Unsurprisingly, the second Trump administration has binged on short-term “wins” at the expense of the future. It has created trillions of dollars in prospective debt, bullied every country on earth, deregulated the spread of A.I. and denied the scientific reality of global warming. It has ignored the math that doesn’t add up, the wars that don’t end on Trump deadlines, the C.E.O.s forecasting what could amount to huge job losses if A.I. transforms our economy and the catastrophic floods, which are harbingers of a changing climate. Mr. Trump declares victory. The camera focuses on the next shiny object. Negative consequences can be obfuscated today, blamed on others tomorrow.

Democrats are also trapped in this short-termism. Opposition to each action Mr. Trump takes may be morally and practically necessary, but it also reinforces his dominance over events. Every day brings a new battle, generating outrage that overwhelms their capacity to present a coherent alternative. The party spends more time defending what is being lost than imagining what will take its place. The public stares down at phones instead of looking to any horizon.

We are all living in the disorienting present, swept along by currents we don’t control. The distractions abound. The data centers get built. And we forget the inconvenience of reality itself: Mr. Trump may be able to escape the consequences of his actions; the rest of us cannot.