“This is an unprecedented situation for companies. The president’s tweets can cause significant reputational harm,” said Dean C. Garfield, the president of the Information Technology Industry Council, which represents big technology companies like Amazon, Dell, Facebook, Google and IBM. “We are now at a place where about 90 percent of the companies we represent now have a presidential Twitter strategy in place.”

The Times only hints at Trump's motives, so let's make it a bit more plain: The man attacks companies primarily as a grift. He used his attacks on Boeing to bend the company to being a more loyal voice for his policies and as a public show of "toughness" that needed to make an example of somebody; after the first troubled months, the company became reliable suck-ups. His attacks on the NFL were a show for his white nativist base, to be sure—but are also the result of a longtime enmity after his own dreams of being a football titan went nowhere.

His attacks on Amazon are very specifically aimed at the Amazon head's ownership of the Washington Post, an outlet that has broken a great many stories about his administration's incompetence, corruption, and especially tidbits from the investigation into Trump team ties to Russian espionage. He has not tried to hide it; the man does not know the meaning of the word subtle. And he is, above all, petty; nearly every attack he has mounted during his presidency has been on a company, usually a news company, that he believes has Done Him Wrong.

The man has little notion of what the "presidency" actually is. He still considers it primarily a platform for his own personal grudges; even summits with the heads of other nations are, to him, opportunities to plug his own private clubs. He watches television, looking for news about himself, and lashes out when the news about himself is not sufficiently flattering.

The man can't do the job he has been given, but lashing out at his enemies? Now that's something he knows. Using his public platform to punish those enemies, or to profit himself? Those are the only things he has, in the last decade, been good at. So that's what he'll be doing in lieu of governing.