Perhaps feeling a rush of power from pardoning a turkey, or else bloodthirsty from having been compelled to spare it, the President of the United States turned into a comic-book supervillain on Wednesday morning. Taking up his ongoing feud with LaVar Ball, the father of LiAngelo Ball, one of three U.C.L.A. basketball players who were arrested for shoplifting while on a trip to China, Donald Trump tweeted, “It wasn’t the White House, it wasn’t the State Department, it wasn’t father LaVar’s so-called people on the ground in China that got his son out of a long term prison sentence - IT WAS ME.” He then called LaVar “a poor man’s version of Don King” and an “ungrateful fool” before turning his attention to professional football.

Scholars have warned for some time about the consolidation of American political power in the executive branch, but there’s perhaps never been a more apt object lesson than a President growling about his underestimated power in all caps. Trump regularly tweets ludicrous things about himself and has been punching down at various members of his constituency since he took office, but Ball seems to have moved him to a new kind of derangement. A working theory is that Trump has met a force of equal and opposite self-regard and bombast, a voluble troll with all the same moves.

Ball, who is forty-nine, is the father of three very talented basketball-playing sons: Lonzo, who now plays for the Lakers; LiAngelo, who is a freshman at U.C.L.A.; and LaMelo, a sixteen-year-old who has committed to play at U.C.L.A. The family’s story is compelling, and LaVar Ball has used it, as well as his own media savvy, to promote his clothing company, Big Baller Brand. Like all gimcrack salesmen, Ball courts controversy and smiles broadly as he speaks nonsense. He once claimed, in a newspaper interview, that he could have beaten Michael Jordan in a game of one on one, and said, in another interview, that Lonzo was better than the two-time league M.V.P. Stephen Curry. In May, LaVar announced that his company’s first pair of signature Lonzo shoes would cost nearly five hundred dollars.

On November 7th, LiAngelo and two other U.C.L.A. freshmen were arrested for shoplifting designer sunglasses and other items from high-end stores in Hangzhou, near where their team was playing an exhibition game. They were detained for almost a week, with little word on their status, before being allowed to fly home. Shoplifting is often punished by jail time in China, and, during a press conference back in the United States, the three players apologized and each thanked President Trump for helping to secure their release. The President, for his part, was already clamoring for credit in a tweet sent out before the press conference.

This minor international incident might have ended there, another in a long line of Presidents helping Americans get out of tight legal spots in autocratic foreign countries. Yet when LaVar Ball was asked by ESPN about Trump’s involvement in the case, Ball pretended not to have heard of him. “Who?” he asked, before adding, “What was he over there for? Don’t tell me nothing. Everybody wants to make it seem like he helped me out.” Trump caught wind of this and responded in a series of angry tweets, writing, at one point, “I should have left them in jail!” On Monday, LaVar Ball went on CNN to keep up his end of this affair, again refusing to thank the President, referring to himself in the third person, and taking the opportunity to promote his clothing brand: “Tell Donald Trump to have a great Thanksgiving, because Big Baller is.”

It’s hard, in this spat, to pick a hero. Steve Kerr, the coach of the Golden State Warriors, who has emerged in these odd times as a national voice of reason, blamed the media for giving both men the kind of exposure they crave (sorry, Coach) and added, “It would be nice . . . if both of them would just be quiet. Wouldn’t that be great?” Nice, perhaps, but, after Trump’s tweets on Wednesday, not to be. Unlike many of the other personal feuds that Trump has stoked from the Oval Office, his interlocutor this time has no personal or practical reasons to back down—especially now that he has been addressed with the racially coded word “ungrateful,” often applied to black athletes who speak up. For this feud to end, it will likely fall on Trump to do something uncharacteristic: let the other guy have the last word.

Trump’s way of resolving a personal dispute to his satisfaction (he’d call it winning) has been to rely on the reasonableness of his opponent to emerge—a spark of intelligence, integrity, grace, shame, or self-awareness; a line of sanity across which he or she will not trespass—at which point that person walks away in disgust and leaves Trump satisfied. It’s the “No puppet!” maneuver, which he deployed during a debate with Hillary Clinton, simply insisting upon things with an obstinate foolishness and waiting for a kernel of normality in his opponent to emerge. For a while during the primary campaign, Marco Rubio tried to engage on Trump’s terms, making sexually suggestive comments about Trump’s “small hands.” But Rubio quickly backed off, clearly ashamed of himself. Recently, Senator Bob Corker, who called the White House an “adult day-care center” during a running public argument with Trump, eventually had to return to more pressing matters as the chair of the Foreign Relations Committee. Unfortunately for Trump, and for the rest of us, LaVar Ball has nothing better to do, and would like nothing more than to continue preening and sparring with the President.

More troubling, the person who seems to understand Trump’s mode of public argument best is the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. In September, after Trump threatened to “totally destroy” North Korea, Kim wrote in an official letter that “action is the best option in treating the dotard who, hard of hearing, is uttering only what he wants to say.” He went on, “He is unfit to hold the prerogative of supreme command of a country, and he is surely a rogue and a gangster fond of playing with fire, rather than a politician.” Kim’s diagnosis of Trump mirrored Trump’s own rhetoric—fixing on his opponent with eccentric, attention-grabbing insults; daring him to further escalate his already outrageous statements; and treating him with a bullying lack of respect. In this way, Kim proved himself to be Trump’s natural foil: a man who favors odd turns of phrase, who imagines himself the lone seat of his government’s power, and who desperately requires genuflection. It shouldn’t need to be said, however, that Kim is a dictator, or that he is one half of a nuclear-weapons standoff that threatens the safety of the world.

As unsettling as it was to see an American President’s psychological motivations so deftly evaluated by a famously erratic despot, it was equally, though less gravely, startling to notice that, between Trump and LaVar Ball, it was Ball who seemed closer to reason. On Monday night, on CNN, Ball said, “Let him do his political affairs and let me handle my son, and let’s just stay in our lane.” Here, finally, LaVar Ball proved himself naïve. For Trump, “political affairs” are indistinguishable from his own personal grievances. He has obliterated the very notion of lanes.