Donald Trump has proven once again that he’s a man you could bait with a quip. His campaign revealed Tuesday that they’ve invited Malik Obama, the estranged half-brother of President Barack Obama and supporter of the Republican nominee, to be in the audience for the final presidential debate on Wednesday night.

Even in the strangest presidential race in U.S. history, this was a singularly bizarre move. It seems to have been set off by the president successfully trolling Trump earlier with the observation, apropos of Trump’s claims of a “rigged” election, that it “doesn’t really show the kind of leadership and toughness that you want out of a president, if you start whining before the game’s even over.”

But Trump’s ham-fisted stab at revenge made no sense in terms of politics. After all, Trump is debating Hillary Clinton, not Obama. There’s no reason to think that inviting Malik Obama would rattle Clinton in the least, or even register in her consciousness. And gratuitously insulting Obama, who has healthy favorability ratings, goes against Trump’s own best interest, which should be to try and discourage Obama supporters from voting for Clinton.

Then again, Trump’s earlier debate-guest gambit didn’t make sense either. He invited three women who alleged they were sexually assaulted by Bill Clinton and even tried to engineer a confrontation between them and the former president—a strikingly foolhardy stunt, since by all polling evidence and previous Republican experience in the 1990s, it only served to make Hillary more sympathetic to the general population.

Trying to make this a battle between Trump and Obama or between Trump and Bill Clinton does follow a pattern that has marked the general election: Trump is more comfortable fighting male politicians of either party than he is in confrontation with Hillary.