Trump’s broadside against Sessions is also remarkable because the attorney general has been one of his staunchest and oldest supporters. Sessions endorsed Trump in February 2016, when most Republican officeholders were keeping Trump at several arms’ length, and he did so at great political risk to himself. The Alabama senator was a major influence on Trump’s positions, from immigration to national security to trade policy, and he loaned Trump one of his own top aides, Stephen Miller, who then became a crucial Trump adviser.

But the president’s fury shows the way that scrutiny of his ties to Russia has come to overshadow all else in the White House’s vision. Trump recognizes the danger that the investigation poses to his agenda and indeed to his presidency itself. He desperately wants to be able to kill the investigation, and yet he realizes how little power he has to do that—hence his anger at Sessions, who he seems to think could have killed investigations into Russia before it was too late had he not recused himself, and who might never have appointed Robert Mueller as special counsel.

“Jeff Sessions, Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers,” Trump said of the attorney general’s confirmation hearings in the Senate. “He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.”

Trump is right. Sessions erred badly in not disclosing meetings with Russian Ambassador Sergey Kislyak to the Senate, which was what forced him to recuse himself from Russia-related matters. But Trump refuses to acknowledge the necessity of Sessions’s recusal. The attorney general was pinched in three ways: First, he was caught in an obvious conflict of interest, having met with Russian officials and not disclosed them; second, he did so while a campaign surrogate, implicating himself in the investigation; and third, he risked setting off a fight with the Senate, having misled them.

But for Trump, there is only one loyalty: to the president himself. When his aides and staffers make the mistake of following any other principle—rule of law, standard ethics policies, U.S. alliances—that might conflict with the principle of loyalty to Trump, the president becomes enraged.

This was true of James Comey, the FBI director whom Trump fired in May. In a January 27 dinner, Comey testified to the Senate, Trump told him, “I need loyalty, I expect loyalty.” Comey was uneasy about that demand, and eventually offered “honest loyalty.” A test of that loyalty came soon enough, on February 14, when Trump spoke to Comey alone and asked him to kill an FBI investigation into Michael Flynn, who had recently been forced to resign as national-security adviser, and had reportedly already lied to FBI agents at that point. “I hope you can see your way clear to letting this go, to letting Flynn go,” Trump said, according to Comey. “He is a good guy. I hope you can let this go.” (In his interview with the Times on Wednesday, Trump said he couldn’t remember this conversation taking place.) When Comey refused to allow presidential interference to kill the Russia investigations, Trump decided to fire him.