One of the most fascinating things about watching Trump navigate controversies like this is the way in which his incendiary statements, with enough repetition, seem to collapse for him into a sort of involuntary tic. If you watch for it, you can trace the trajectory day by day: First, some one-off tweet or rally ad-lib sparks a ruckus. This kicks a sort of rapidly decaying feedback loop: The TV yakkers can’t stop talking about the ruckus, which means Trump, a media creature who often picks his daily crises from the morning news, can’t stop pugilistically defending himself, which gives the yakkers more to talk about, and so on.

After a few days of this, the controversy being discussed has irretrievably ossified in some high-traffic area of the president’s increasingly cluttered brain, such that from then on he seems to have difficulty discussing any subject in the neighborhood of the controversy without wading in again. (This also happens with smaller, more innocuous things—say, Trump’s regular mini-monologue about how he was the genius who named the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, or his regular and suspiciously similar “Sir” stories, or his repeated insistences that the eventual Mexican border wall be “see-through,” so that nobody gets crushed unexpectedly by the bags of drugs cartels hurl over.)

If you’re a reluctant Trump supporter—say, a man like Ron Johnson—the idea that Trump is wielding his little spats and fights as a political weapon is likely a source of comfort to you. After all, the alternative—that there is no master plan, that Trump decides to pick fights like a dog decides to chase cars, that we are currently presided over by a man in thrall to every sharp-elbowed impulse of his media-addled mind—is a very grim thought indeed.