As Robert Mueller’s investigation into potential coordination between the Donald Trump presidential campaign and the Russian government expands, Attorney General Jeff Sessions has found himself in an increasingly uncomfortable pickle. In a recent hair-raising interview with The New York Times (even by Trump’s baffling standards), the president expressed remorse for hiring Sessions in the first place and installing him as the Attorney General. Trump, after all, appears to have pinned much of the Russia fiasco on Sessions’s decision to recuse himself from the investigation on account of his inability to report two meetings with ambassador Sergey Kislyak, a seemingly ubiquitous character on the periphery of Trump’s circle for a time. The fateful decision, which seemed jurisprudentially responsible, was one of a cascading series of decisions which led to the appointment of Mueller.

Trump’s public shaming of his A.G.—a form of hazing usually reaped upon Sean Spicer and Steve Bannon—overlooks, of course, the fact that it was Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who suggested that he fire F.B.I. director James Comey in the first place; his own son Donny Jr., who arranging a meeting with an allegedly Kremlin-connected figure peddling dirt on Hillary Clinton. Nevertheless, as Trump told the Times, “Sessions should have never recused himself, and if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else,” before adding that the decision was “very unfair to the president.”

Recent accounts from people close to the D.O.J. and the White House paint the previously rosy relationship between Sessions and Trump as fraught and strained—despite the former’s continued diligence in seeking to enact the president’s immigration and criminal justice agenda. The tensions between Trump and Sessions heightened to the point that the attorney general reportedly offered to resign, though the president didn’t accept the offer. “Everything that is happening was triggered by Sessions’s recusal,” longtime G.O.P. political operative and Trump ally Roger Stone said in an interview with the New York Times. “The president initially bonded with Sessions because he saw him as a tough guy . . . Now he’s saying: ‘Where’s my tough guy? Why doesn’t he have my back?’”

For Sessions, this latest disgrace is attended by a sad irony. During the presidential campaign, Sessions emerged as one of Trump’s most steadfast and loyal surrogates after he backed the New York real-estate mogul’s bid for the White House—the first Republican senator to do so. (According to Joshua Green’s new book, Devil’s Bargain, Sessions had to be talked off the ledge by Bannon before the fateful endorsement, fearful that he was jettisoning his entire career.) And when Trump ascended to the presidency, he rewarded Sessions with the plumb top lawyer job. But when Sessions recused himself from the F.B.I.’s Russia investigation in March, the president took it as a betrayal. The once formidable tie between the two has rapidly deteriorated amid the ever-widening Mueller probe.

Trump isn’t wrong that Sessions’s recusal, arguably, set off a chain of events unfavorable to the White House. If he hadn’t stepped aside, Rod Rosenstein wouldn’t have been put in charge of the ongoing D.O.J. Trump-Russia investigation, and the deputy attorney general wouldn’t have had the power to appoint Mueller as special counsel after Trump unexpectedly ousted Comey. Following reports that Mueller and his team have begun investigating Trump’s finances, the president has reportedly begun discussing his pardon powers and ways to sabotage Mueller’s investigation with his legal team. By publicly airing grievances about perceived conflicts of interest among members of the special counsel’s team, Trump seems to be laying the groundwork to fire Mueller—which would set off a political and legal firestorm of “Saturday Night Massacre” proportions.