This morning, Trump upped the ante in that battle, taking to Twitter in a predawn tirade against Ball, dedicating two tweets to calling the basketball dad an “ungrateful fool,” and calling him “a poor man’s version of Don King, but without the hair.” In addition to those tweets, the president squeezed in another, reiterating his criticism of the NFL for merely allowing players to kneel, all hours before addressing his policy meetings and a developing naval incident in the Philippine Sea involving missing military personnel.

This is all, of course, a sideshow in a week with numerous bombshell reports of sexual abuse among members of Congress and the media, with a major tax bill looming, and with plenty of other important domestic and foreign-policy issues to confront. But for Trump, the sideshow appears to be the real show. Of his 17 tweets and retweets this week, the president has dedicated seven to attacking black people or protests by black people.

On this topic, Trump is a broken record. He’s repeatedly gone after NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick and other black athletes for on-the-field protests, culminating in his “son of a bitch” attack in an Alabama rally in September.

Trump has raged against Golden State Warriors point guard Steph Curry for his refusal to visit the White House, and subsequently disinvited the whole team. He and his office have launched sustained, coordinated verbal assaults on the ESPN anchor Jemele Hill and Florida Representative Frederica Wilson. Trump has picked fights with the civil-rights hero Representative John Lewis, saying he was “all talk, talk, talk—no action or results.” And, of course, the steam that got the Trump train started came from his long-running denigration of President Barack Obama, a campaign that ran the gamut from embracing birtherism to implying the former president was a lazy man who vacationed too much. This is an abridged list.

It seems trite to say that Trump likes to pick fights with black people—he picks fights with everyone, in the most shocking and crass ways—but the president does have a knack for knocking down the kinds of black folks members of his base want to see knocked down. There are plenty of people on all sides of the political and racial spectrums hoping LaVar Ball types will receive their comeuppance, but generally, Trump has saved his most sustained assaults for black people who are prominent and popular among young people, and for those who in a different era might have been considered “uppity.”

“Uppityness” is today recognized as a slur, and how it got that way is instructive in explaining Trump’s rise to power. Back when the lives and career prospects of black people were officially constrained by the state, and when social and cultural hierarchies were enforced on pain of death, black people who dared aspire to a life and world beyond those constraints were often branded with the label. The maintenance of those hierarchies depended on making examples of the outspoken and the ambitious. Though the implements have changed from the braided whips of the past to the verbal upbraidings of the present, the purpose of attacking uppity blacks has always been to reinforce the status quo and limit mobility, in all senses of that word.