The sole exception to all this Fox-branded formulaic self-celebration is Shepard Smith, a daytime news anchor on the network, and a polarizing figure among Fox News viewers because his block of programming tends less toward ultra-partisan agitprop than the rest of the Fox News lineup does. There is more to unpack in this bit of text, if you want. Shepard Smith is openly gay, and that “pal” may be an attempt to suggest that Napolitano is as well. (Or it might just be Trump putting quotes around a randomly selected word, which is also something he does frequently.) The accusation that Napolitano came to Trump and begged for a job is also a regular Trumpian trope; often the people beseeching him are crying, sometimes they are bleeding, always they are desperate and so undignified, and always they are turned away.

There was a time, before he’d ascended to the most powerful political office in the world, when this sort of opaque feud was something like Donald Trump’s only job. He pursued it with his whole being, albeit (and yet again) not with much in the way of style. As Hurricane Sandy bore down on New York City in 2012, Trump took a moment to tweet about the “double standard” that allowed Bette Midler to joke about his hair but made it so that he was “not allowed to talk about her ugly face or body.” (Trump revived his obsessive Twitter feud with Midler during a state visit to England in early June, as this piece was going to press.) He tweeted dozens of times, with similar artlessness, about Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter, who had memorably and serially mocked Trump during the 1980s. “Graydon Carter has no talent and looks like shit!” Trump tweeted five days before Christmas in 2012. “Also, his food sucks!” (Trump is presumably referring here not to the editor’s personal meat loaf recipe but to the menu at the Waverly Inn, the “bad food restaurant” that Carter opened in the West Village.) Long-running online blood feuds with the brassy star of Beaches and the editor of a magazine for and about rich people are not the sort of behavior ordinarily associated with populist politicians. But then Trump had not yet rebranded himself as one.

Trump found himself in lockstep with many other members of his generation, who chose to cultivate in the clean and curated fields of social media a space where their grievances of choice could grow.

Mostly, he was just what he had been his whole life to that point: a wealthy dullard with what he perceived to be a divine right to the admiration, and grateful deference, of others. By mathematical necessity, this deeply spiteful and petty vision of the world and one’s place in it also conjures a world-historic capacity for taking offense. Trump picked his enemies not wisely but too well, then as now, and found himself hooked on Twitter in the same way that a lot of other people find themselves strung out on their social media of choice—first because he wanted to make himself look impressive and happy, and then because he needed to destroy anyone and everyone who’d ever made him look or feel less so, and then, finally, because his life had shrunk to the point that it fit comfortably within a phone’s screen. After a lifetime spent leveraging and lying himself into ever more commanding views, Trump found himself in lockstep with many other members of his generation, who chose to cultivate in the clean and curated fields of social media a space where their grievances of choice could grow.

The market being the market, there was a parallel media providing them with grievances to choose from. Trump has always been a creature of television. Before he became a being of pure Foxian grievance, and years before he became something like the subject and object of virtually all the programming on Fox News and Fox Business, Trump tweeted his takes on the celebrity gossip he gleaned from Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood with the same energy that he now brings to his regular morning ritual of transcribing Fox & Friends for his online followers. The lewd sexist monologue from 2005 that briefly got Trump into trouble during the 2016 election was directed at Access Hollywood correspondent Billy Bush, and began with a free-associative anecdote about a failed attempt to seduce Entertainment Tonight anchor Nancy O’Dell by taking her shopping for couches.