Because Trump’s moves are (or seem) more calibrated for political messaging than for policy effectiveness, one of the most striking things about his week of tweets criticizing international companies for doing business internationally is how paltry the number of American jobs he’s actually concerned himself with is, in the scheme of things. In total, it's in the neighborhood of 3,000—roughly the number of jobs the U.S. economy added in one third of one average day of August 2016, a strong-ish month for the recovery. Plus, notably, he’s singling out factory investments in Mexico while ignoring relevant examples in Canada, further evidence that his motive may be more scapegoating than it is actually helping people.

It’s extremely unlikely that Trump will ever warm up to globalization, which in turn makes it unlikely that he’ll scale back his fiery condemnations of firms—automakers and others—that import goods manufactured abroad into the U.S. What does Trump’s focus on specific companies—and often on relatively small decisions those companies make—mean for American society, and specifically for American business? Under Trump, many companies will (and already do) feel pulled two ways—in one direction towards their interests in capturing the economic efficiencies of globalization and in the other direction toward appeasing a U.S. president whose outbursts and obloquies are unpredictable and bad for their business, and who has a personal stake in scoring political wins by keeping manufacturing domestic, efficiency be damned.

From his behavior so far, it seems that Trump thinks a big part of his job will be to examine and adjudicate particular companies’ behavior and to decide what’s allowed and what’s fair on a situational basis, not just on a policy one. Without hyperventilating over the term, this means that in one small way he wants to operate like a king.

This brings up an important difference between a king’s court and an administration. An administration is made of public policies, and of the politics by which policies live or die. It’s outward-facing, making decisions about the government as it relates to society, not the other way around. When the personal traits and lives of administrators become the main story, for example when political scandal erupts, it usually means something has gone wrong for them. A court, on the other hand, deals in palace intrigue. The players in power, the courtiers, are themselves the story, and they are supposed to be.

While Americans certainly have an appetite for obsessing over the private lives of the powerful, the U.S. has traditionally been suspicious of the politics of personality; when George Washington’s critics wanted to insult him, they called him George IV, as though he had merely succeeded the English monarch. Trump, though, has not worked to avoid the impression that he is running a court or something that looks very much like it—with Mar-a-Lago and Trump Tower cast as Versailles, much of the news cycles in the transition period revolving around the changing fortunes of those in the inner circle as they relate to him as the center of power, and upturned norms against placing family members in close, official orbit.