During Monday’s press briefing, White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders introduced a bizarre requirement: in keeping with the Thanksgiving holiday, White House reporters had to tell the room what they were thankful for before asking questions pertaining to the nation’s governance. Most played along, with at least one saying, pointedly, “I’m thankful for the First Amendment.” But if Sanders’s antics came off as condescending, they paled in comparison to those of her boss, who is evidently still nursing his wounds over a petty Twitter feud with a pushy basketball stage dad.

For a time, Donald Trump found his war of words with LaVar Ball to be a welcome distraction from weighing whether or not to support accused child molester Roy Moore, and watching the G.O.P.’s tax-reform bill-cum-Obamacare death blow plod its way through the Senate. While Ball’s son, one of three U.C.L.A. basketball players arrested in China for shoplifting, publicly thanked the president following his return to the United States, Ball, who is known for his own Trump-sized boasts in the sports world, scoffed at Trump’s claims that he had interceded with Chinese president Xi Jinping on the players’ behalf.

“Who? What was he over there for? Don’t tell me nothing,” Ball said on ESPN, shortly after the president suggested that he should have left the students to rot in jail. “Everybody wants to make it seem like he helped me out . . . If you went to visit them in jail then I would say, ‘Thank you.’” Drawing upon the same fury he reserves for people like North Korean dictator Kim Jong Un and the mass-murdering drug lord El Chapo Guzmán, on Wednesday morning Trump addressed a series of blistering, Thanksgiving-themed tweets to the basketball huckster:

Never mind a complex web of media pressure, China’s interest in maintaining diplomatic relations, or even the region’s desire to entice American players to join its pro-basketball leagues; it was all Trump’s doing. Of course, Trump has taken sole credit for a vast array of things that have little or nothing to do with him. “Let me tell you, the one that matters is me,” Trump said in an interview with Fox News’s Laura Ingraham earlier this month in regards to State Department policy. He added, “I’m the only one that matters, because when it comes to it, that’s what the policy is going to be. You’ve seen that, you’ve seen it strongly.”

Days later, he told reporters en route to Tokyo, “The reason our stock market is so successful is because of me. I’ve always been great with money, I’ve always been great with jobs, that’s what I do. And I’ve done it well.” His claims might be outlandish, but at least they’re consistently, predictably outlandish—something for which Americans can truly be grateful.