As Special Counsel Robert Mueller relentlessly burrows into Trumpworld—perhaps “more deeply than is publicly known,” a source told Axios on Monday—and as tax reform hits new stumbling blocks in the Senate, Donald Trump has zeroed in on the two things he likes best about the presidency: nursing petty Twitter feuds and inflating his own ego. Having previously taken shots at professional athletes for things like kneeling and rejecting invitations to the White House, on Sunday the president turned his ire toward LaVar Ball, the father of one of the U.C.L.A. basketball players accused of shoplifting in China.

Ball, who has a long history of trash-talking famous basketball players like Michael Jordan and Stephen Curry, ostensibly to promote the family brand, told ESPN that Trump had little influence on China’s decision to free his son. “Who? What was he over there for? Don’t tell me nothing. Everybody wants to make it seem like he helped me out,” he said shortly after a press conference in which his son and two teammates, free to return to the U.S., thanked Trump for interceding with Chinese President Xi Jinping. “If you went to visit them in jail then I would say, ‘Thank you,’” Ball added.

Rather than let an F-list wannabe basketball mogul run his mouth, the president tweeted back furiously:

Then, on Monday morning, Trump bashed N.F.L. star Marshawn Lynch, who knelt during “The Star-Spangled Banner” but stood for Mexico’s national anthem. Minutes after Fox & Friends ran a segment on Lynch’s protest, the president tweeted again:

Though at times the president’s tweets seem specifically designed to distract from negative press, this most recent volley suggests that, like the occupations of the players he targets, Trump’s penchant for hurling online insults is his version of a national pastime: a welcome distraction from the grinding minutiae of work and the quest to cement his electoral legacy through a floundering political agenda. Aides have similarly learned how to bolster the president’s spirits. As Politico reported on Saturday, Trump’s staff routinely shows him polls that are “designed to make him feel good,” such as those that only survey subsets of the country that voted for him—a spokeswoman for the R.N.C., the source of one such poll, said the data are available to show “the priorities and sentiments of voters in a way that traditional polling does not.”