“Donald Trump lashes out” is not always a newsworthy headline. But recent reporting from inside the UFC-festooned White House suggests that our commander in chief has somehow reached a new level of raging petulance. “He’s pissed, and people are not recognizing the level of pissed that he is,” is how one rattled White House ally put it to Politico.

What’s set Trump off is what always sets him off: the manifest failure of even today’s invertebrate Republican Party to carry out every self-glorifying iota of his bidding. His most recent tantrum concerned the reluctance of GOP lawmakers to sign off on his batshit nomination of Bill Pulte to head the Directorate of National Intelligence—a move that Trump was forced grudgingly to reverse on Thursday.

Not that that’s cause for much celebration. Trump’s new nominee is former Securities and Exchange commissioner and current US attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton—who, like Pulte, possesses zero intelligence experience and is also a practiced Trump bootlicker, having cheered the president’s $1.8 billion slush fund for January 6 rioters and his unhinged conspiracy theories about election fraud in California. This post-9/11 sinecure is so inconsequential in the cabinet that it initially went to Tulsi Gabbard (for whom the agency’s acronym stood for “do not invite,” per Oval Office gossip hounds).

True, this post-9/11 sinecure is so inconsequential in the cabinet that it initially went to Tulsi Gabbard (for whom the agency’s acronym stood for “do not invite,” per Oval Office gossip hounds). Yet even so, both Pulte and Calyton were (and are) stunningly unqualified nominees for the post, which under law requires directors to have the kind of intelligence experience that both men conspicuously lack.

Pulte in particular was horrifyingly ill-suited to the job. As the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency (FHFA), his chief specialty was to go after public figures on Trump’s ever-expanding enemies list, such as New York Attorney General Letitia James and Federal Reserve governor Lisa Cook, with content-challenged accusations of mortgage fraud. As intelligence chief, Pulte would have been empowered to carry out a far wider range of ideological vendettas against anyone who might flit across the president’s grievance-addled brainpan. His nomination was so egregious that even the Trump-appeasing Senate majority leader John Thune greeted it with stunned disbelief. “We don’t need a weaponized DNI,” Thune said to a group of reporters. “We need professionals there. If [Pulte] is someone we want in that position permanently, he’s got a lengthy road ahead of him.”

Translated from Capitol Hill–ese, that was a direct message to Trump that the nomination was a nonstarter. But of course the very qualities that make Pulte wildly unfit for a sensitive security post are exactly why Trump wanted him there. His willingness to fabricate baseless assaults on Trump’s political enemies at FHFA was a signal that he’d gladly turn the country’s intelligence operations into a glorified cottage industry of MAGA-branded retribution. (Gabbard, who had eagerly abased herself and, if such a thing is possible, further discredited the country’s spook complex by launching a plainly bogus and likely illegal investigation into Georgia’s voting systems as part of Trump’s bottomless 2020 election vendetta, can now only look on in professional envy.)

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It’s not hard to work out why Trump is selecting characters like Pulte and Clayton to oversee national intelligence. As he fends off record-low approval ratings, a growing defection from his heartland MAGA base over his ruinous economic record, and the stench from the deepening quagmire of his disastrous war in Iran, score-settling remains the only part of his agenda he still has a handle on. So when House Speaker Mike Johnson—another reliable Trump suck-up who’d been forced to acknowledge that the Pulte nomination was dead in the water—begged Trump to pull the nomination in order to expedite passage of the reauthorization of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) ahead of its expiration on Friday, Trump instead stepped up his public effort to get the party behind Pulte. Another unnamed GOP staffer told Politico that his rejection of Johnson’s overtures was “a middle finger to Congress.” And oddly enough for an institution mostly operating on brain-dead autopilot throughout this Trump term, Congress responded in kind; the House voted down a Trump-endorsed last-minute plan to re-up FISA.

Given the kind of unhinged power that FISA would deliver into a DNI run by MAGA lackeys, one can scarcely mourn this turn of events. Yet the bigger picture here is quite instructive, and speaks volumes about what we might call the Roy Cohn phase of the Trump presidency: In order to install a political hit man in the country’s top spying post, the White House is treating the operations that the DNI oversees as a complete afterthought. It’s a bit like telling Trump’s Federal Reserve chair, Kevin Warsh, that he’ll have no control over the money supply—something that’s also not too outlandish to rule out in Trumpworld.

Cohn, of course, was the former legal henchman for Joe McCarthy, and Trump’s first political mentor. He taught the young real estate heir to never admit he was in the wrong and to pursue vicious public campaigns of reprisal against an expanding roster of enemies, along with more practical life hacks Trump took to heart, such as consistently stiffing your creditors. Cohn’s legacy of brutal score-settling is the clear through line in this Trump White House, from the recent proposal to crack down on press leaks by forcing nondisclosure agreements on employees of the federal government to Trump’s “revenge tour” set of primary endorsements to dislodge sitting GOP lawmakers he holds grudges against, like Kentucky House Representative Thomas Massie and Senators Bill Cassidy of Louisiana and John Cornyn of Texas. (Indeed, another source of Trump’s seething rage against the GOP establishment is his failed endorsement of Iowa gubernatorial hopeful Randy Feenstra, in a farm state lately souring on the MAGA economic agenda.) The president’s insatiable appetite for payback is also the obvious driving force behind the January 6 $1.8 billion “anti-weaponization fund” that he refuses to scuttle even though both congressional Republicans and his lickspittle acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, have backed away from it. (It says something about how very prostrate Blanche is in his other official duties that Trump has also nominated him to the office permanently in another power play that congressional Republicans are leery of.)

The problem with a vendetta-first approach to governance is that a Caesarist figure like Trump is prone to mistake his own grievances for the vox populi. To take one obvious example of this delusive counter-logic, Trump muscled aside an eminently electable figure like the Senate incumbent Cornyn in favor of Texas Attorney Ken Paxton—a squalid character so widely loathed in Texas that even the lawyer who defended him on corruption and impeachment charges over the past decade has endorsed his Senate opponent James Talarico. The same brand of imperial folly surfaced when a reporter asked Trump about the dismal new inflation numbers from May—the highest spike in prices over the past three years. “I love the inflation,” the president shot back, adding that prices “would come down like a rock” after the resolution of the Iran War. The stupefying exchange will doubtless appear in a tsunami of Democratic attack ads between now and the November midterms, as Exhibit A in the case that Trump is terminally out of touch with the struggles of ordinary Americans. That is certainly true enough, but the no-less disturbing truth here is that such considerations simply don’t matter to a president who can only see the common weal as the prime outlet for his wish fulfillment fantasies. In Trump’s funhouse-mirror version of reality, inflation matters only as something that will eventually deliver him better polling numbers.

This is also why, as a beleaguered GOP Congress staggers toward its remaining emergency fiscal votes, Trump is once more trying to ram through another unworkable reconciliation bill to bypass the Senate filibuster. (He’s also pressed Thune to nuke the filibuster itself, to no avail.) Trump wants to use this bill to revive his pet voter-suppression measure, the SAVE act, even though the Senate parliamentarian has previously, and correctly, ruled that the insane provisions of the legislation don’t have any material impact on the budget—the key threshold for any reconciliation vote. (Has Trump also pressured Thune to shitcan the Senate parliamentarian, again to no avail? Check, and check again—though in that case the pertinent thought crime was a similar ruling against plans to fund Trump’s hideous, outsize White House ballroom in the building’s former East Wing.) He also wants another $350 billion to continue funding the fiasco in Iran, which now appears to be on the verge of turning into a ground war.

The SAVE act itself is pure vendetta politics, since it seeks to address a nonexistent epidemic of voter fraud that in Trump’s megalomaniacal reveries represents the only possible explanation for his 2020 election defeat. Put another way, Trump is using his maximal executive powers to bully Congress into seeing all his vindictive fantasies through to the bitter end. It’s tempting to see the grim makings of Greek tragedy in this purblind model of governance as payback—but there’s far too much farce in the Trumpian ego to sustain any such analogy. A better life lesson can be drawn from the life story of Roy Cohn, who died alone, friendless, and closeted at the height of the AIDS epidemic in 1986, just weeks after the New York State Supreme Court disbarred him for unethical conduct. Revenge may be all that matters to Donald Trump now, but karma may well have other plans in store for him.