President Donald Trump is very upset with Attorney General Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III, and he's telling anyone who will listen: Aides within the administration. His Twitter followers. The Wall Street Journal. Reporters gathered at a press conference.

He's mulling firing Sessions or, at the very least, hoping to make the former Alabama senator so uncomfortable that he walks away from his job. Trump's stated reason for being so down on the attorney general is that Sessions recused himself from the investigation into Russia's interference in the 2016 election, a probe which Trump seems to view as nothing more than a personal slight against his yuge victory, facts notwithstanding.

"I am disappointed in the attorney general. He should not have recused himself almost immediately after he took office. And if he was going to recuse himself, he should have told me prior to taking office, and I would have, quite simply, picked somebody else," Trump said on Tuesday. Asked if he will fire Sessions, he replied "time will tell."

What's going on here? Why is the president waging war against the cabinet official most closely associated with the Trumpian worldview, and who is implementing it in all its horrible glory? Why risk the wrath of the conservative media – who love them some Jeff Sessions – and make Sessions' former colleagues in Congress squirm, especially when Sessions himself seems adamant that he's not going anywhere?

There's the Russia investigation, of course. Trump seems to have made it a personal mission that each and every day he will do something to make it look like that inquiry will turn up something real and actionable. So hammering on Sessions' recusal fits right in.

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But there's also the simple fact that Trump always wants to have an enemy against whom he can campaign, and right now, there's no one around who can adequately be his foil, so he's turning on his own team.

During the 2016 election, Trump clearly benefited from all the anti-Hillary Clinton animosity among the electorate, profiting from the decades-long right-wing effort to portray Clinton as someone on par with the antichrist. Before that, he reveled in the ability to simply throw punches during the primary, dishing out silly monikers and insulting his way to victory after victory.

His campaign wasn't really about policy. It was about attitude, and making people who felt condescended to by those left-wing liberal elitists believe Trump was in their corner. And it was all in contrast to long-time politicians who were easily portrayed as the problem, not the solution. Slinging verbal punches was the only time he seemed truly comfortable.

Now, though, Trump is the politician, but he still wants to be running against somebody. Hence his habit of mentioning Clinton all the time in interviews, as if it's still the fall of 2016. And he seems to want the Justice Department in on the act, pursuing cases against her, and presumably his other political opponents, in order for him to have fodder to feed his followers, new targets onto whom he can direct their animus. He doesn't want to work on policy, he just wants to land punches.

Case in point: "Attorney General Jeff Sessions has taken a VERY weak position on Hillary Clinton crimes," Trump tweeted on Tuesday. "Why didn't A.G. Sessions replace Acting FBI Director Andrew McCabe, a Comey friend who was in charge of Clinton investigation," he asked Wednesday.

I'm not in his head, of course, but it seems Trump desperately wants to be running against someone specific again, getting back to that campaign trail high rather than bogged down in the boring, sad details of actually being the president. That's his wheelhouse, and it's when he was running against Clinton that his popularity was at its peak. Since Sessions isn't providing Trump with anything new, he's received a target on his own back. If that all sounds crazy, well, so was the rest of Trump's id-directed run to the presidency, and he's done nothing to dispel the idea that he believes everything that worked during the campaign will work in the Oval Office too.

There are two lessons here. The first is that loyalty, as far as the president is concerned, only runs one way. Sessions was Trump's first prominent Republican backer, and that got him a Cabinet position and precisely six months of goodwill; now that Sessions won't undermine the law in order to help Trump politically, he's basically chopped liver.

The second is confirmation that Trump actually cares not a whit for the agenda he outlined on the campaign trail; it was a means to an end, nothing more. After all, Sessions is the ultimate Trump choice and, as noted before, has done more than perhaps anyone in the government to actually turn Trump's campaign trail rhetoric into policy, particularly when it comes to immigration. (On that level, I certainly wouldn't be sad to see Sessions leave the Justice Department, ne'er to return.) But that's not worth it unless it comes with undying fealty.