There’s no relationship more fascinating these days than the one between President Trump and the tech titans of Silicon Valley and the Pacific Northwest. There are personal, political and business dynamics in play that frequently conflict, throwing off sparks that make for an incredibly bad (i.e. good) reality show.

Tune in and you’ll find people hamming it up before the cameras, acting badly, sticking it to rivals, showing how tough they are while revealing their emotional neediness. This is Trump, who always has to be the star of the show—and, as president of the United States, is. Then you’ve got people who have changed the world with products that, be it Beijing, Boston or Berlin, are life-altering and utterly ubiquitous. They sit atop corporations with trillion-dollar market caps (or close to it) and—talk about a wealth gap—are sometimes worth dozens of times more than the president.

It’s this point that drives Trump—who uses money to keep score—nuts. Not only are Amazon’s AMZN, +0.66% Jeff Bezos, Facebook’s FB, +0.20% Mark Zuckerberg and Alphabet’s GOOG, +0.92% dynamic duo of Larry Page and Sergey Brin far wealthier than the president, they’re also far younger. Their average age is just 45—a full 27 years younger than Trump. The notoriously insecure Trump probably finds comfort in the fact that he’s worth more than two other big shots—Tim Cook and Satya Nadella, the CEOs of Apple AAPL, +1.02% and Microsoft MSFT, +1.29% , who didn’t build the companies they now run. But at 57 and 51, Cook and Nadella, like the others, have decades of world-conquering and wealth accumulation ahead of them. Trump, at 72, is powerful now, but knows and fears that in two years, he could be nothing more than an ignored, irrelevant old man on the golf course.

The CEOs have already gotten what they wanted from the president—giant tax cuts, which have bolstered already fat bottom lines by billions. If Trump stopped there, they’d be thrilled. But what Trump giveth, Trump taketh away. His trade war terrifies Apple, which gets about a quarter of its revenue from China. Thanks to frantic lobbying, the White House last week exempted Apple, for now, from import tariffs on two products that are made in China— smartwatches and wireless earbuds. But far more important products, like iPhones, apparently remain vulnerable to the escalating feud between Trump and Chinese President Xi Jinping, neither of whom shows any sign of backing down. It’s amazing that Apple—one of the world’s mightiest companies—is just a pawn being used by the world’s two most powerful men.

Trump last week said that $200 billion of Chinese goods will now face a 10% tariff, which will jump to 25% in January. Because of this, he says China will pay billions in tariffs. This shows that the president doesn’t know how tariffs work. China isn’t paying. Companies that import products made in China pay—and either eat that cost (thus cutting into profit margins) or pass it along to you. With the Christmas season approaching, this is a Scrooge-like move that’s going to hit big importers like Amazon—and thus you—right in the wallet.

Trade-war trackers:Here are the new levies imposed and threatened

Trump supporters say if companies like Apple and Amazon just made products here, we wouldn’t have to have this unpleasant discussion. But then they’d be bitching about having to pay more for everything—like two grand for an iPhone, which is what they’d cost if made here, according to various analyses.

Which brings us to another reason big tech hates Trump: his views on immigration. Syria is one of the countries on Trump’s (mostly-Muslim) travel ban. It’s a good thing such a ban didn’t exist in the 1950s, otherwise Abdul Fattah Jandali never would have come here—and have a son the world came to know as Steve Jobs.

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You’d think that the president—who’s always talking about jobs, jobs, jobs—would appreciate the fact that the U.S. economy is vibrant and entrepreneurial in no small part because of immigrants. Inc. magazine notes that immigrants are more than twice as likely as native-borns to start companies, and that 40% of the Fortune 500 was either founded by immigrants or the children of immigrants. “Apple would not exist without diversity,” Cook has said.

And what to make of the fact that Trump—who as a businessman was always railing against government interference in the private sector—now talks about regulations for Twitter, Facebook, and Google, and changing libel laws (good luck) so he can sue newspapers like (the Bezos-owned) Washington Post? The president says he’s being treated unfairly by these companies for alleged shadow banning (he offers no proof) and in the case of the Post, printing stories he doesn’t like. The president tweets all day long, unencumbered, on Twitter to nearly 55 million followers. So unfair!

As for libel, there’s nothing stopping Trump from suing Woodward, the Post, or anyone right now. But he never does. You know why? Because the best defense against libel is something that is rarely on his side: truth. Then there is this: if libel laws were somehow loosened, then target number one of innumerable lawsuits just might be Mr. Trump himself.