President Trump’s decision to strip the security clearance of John Brennan, a former director of the C.I.A., qualifies as one of the least surprising moves from the White House this year. Mr. Brennan has been an outspoken critic of Mr. Trump, and the president’s skin is as thin as his regard for democratic norms. And despite the laughable rationalizations now being peddled by administration apologists, Mr. Brennan’s spanking is just the latest display of what has become standard operating procedure for this president: using the official levers of government to punish critics and to encourage other detractors to sit down and shut up.

Mr. Trump’s act of spite against Mr. Brennan is less ambitious and, frankly, less imaginative, than some of the other avenues of retribution he has explored. Aggrieved over what he considers insufficiently obsequious coverage by The Washington Post, Mr. Trump has repeatedly threatened to punish the paper’s owner, Jeff Bezos, by raising the postal rates paid by the online retail giant Amazon, of which Mr. Bezos is the founder and chief executive. Similarly, in the midst of his snit over the protests by National Football League players who have taken a knee during the national anthem, Mr. Trump instructed aides to brainstorm ideas for going after the league in last year’s tax-reform package.

Then there was the president’s failed attempt to block the merger between AT&T and Time Warner, which pretty much everyone recognized as part of his long-simmering animus toward the news media in general and CNN in particular. (The network is owned by Time Warner.) When the Department of Justice filed suit last November on antitrust grounds, the administration insisted that Mr. Trump had no part in the decision — a claim that would have been more credible if Mr. Trump had not vowed to block the merger more than a year earlier, when he was still a candidate. It also didn’t help Mr. Trump’s case that his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani said that the president had “denied the merger.”

On a more intimate scale, the Trump White House has delighted in selectively barring journalists from official events. Just last month , Kaitlan Collins, a White House reporter for CNN, was called into the West Wing, scolded for having asked the president “inappropriate” questions earlier that day and then informed that she would not be attending Mr. Trump’s Rose Garden appearance with the head of the European Commission — an event open to the news media. Then again, at least Ms. Collins wasn’t shoved around and physically ejected from the premises, as happened in May to Ellen Knickmeyer, a reporter for The Associated Press who was trying to cover a speech by Scott Pruitt , at that time the head of the Environmental Protection Agency. Faced with blowback, the administration insisted that the room had reached capacity.