The principal aim of President Trump’s second term is revenge.

Trump is consumed by this lust for revenge. It defined the first moments of his second term. “Within hours of taking the presidential oath,” my news-side colleagues Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan report in “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” the president “stripped protective details” from Gen. Mark Milley, the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs of staff, “and others he had viewed as disloyal, including former national security adviser John Bolton, former Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and former Defense Secretary Mark Esper.”

Revenge against the aides and officials who restrained Trump’s worst impulses. Revenge against the bureaucrats and “deep state” agents who challenged his lawbreaking. Revenge against the prosecutors who pursued cases against him and against the judges who ruled in their favor. Revenge against the few Republicans who voted for his impeachment and conviction and against those who abandoned him after Jan. 6. And last, revenge against the American people, for rejecting him in 2020 and dealing a grievous blow to his ego.

Revenge shapes the president’s priorities, drives his actions and structures the decisions of his government. Nowhere is this more apparent than when Trump turns the weight of the federal government against those Americans who defy his will.

Take Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia. He was supposed to disappear — unlawfully shipped to a foreign dungeon and left to languish as part of the administration’s draconian deportation program. But with the help of his family, lawyers and lawmakers, Abrego Garcia fought back.

Not only did he successfully challenge his removal and captivity, but he also won a unanimous decision from the Supreme Court, which ordered the federal government to facilitate his return to the United States. Soon after, the Department of Justice announced his criminal indictment, and he was imprisoned, again.

He fought this, too. In May, a judge dismissed the criminal case against him.

The Ahab-like tenacity of the White House in its pursuit of Abrego Garcia might make sense if he were some criminal mastermind — a danger to the public order. He wasn’t. He was just an ordinary person, a working member of his community who happened to be an easy target for the president’s deportation machine.

He was supposed to be an example — a warning to immigrants, legal or otherwise, to leave the country or suffer the consequences. By challenging the administration and winning in court, Abrego Garcia threatened the president’s program. He stood as a symbol of defiance in the face of Trump’s despotic abuse of power. This is why the Trump administration wouldn’t let up. As an unnamed White House adviser told Rolling Stone last year, “The last thing you want to do here is contribute to a domino effect of decisions where suddenly you’re admitting you’re wrong about everything.”

Trump tried to crush Abrego Garcia, and when he couldn’t, he made it the priority of his government to punish him for his resistance. This was less policymaking than obsession. And it should be said that Trump has still not given up; his Department of Justice has asked an appeals court to reinstate the criminal charges against Abrego Garcia.

Abrego Garcia is not alone. Trump has, for most of the summer, been pursuing a vendetta against David Hearn, a former Olympic canoeist. Hearn was accused of vandalizing the Reflecting Pool at the Lincoln Memorial, which is in a state of disrepair in the wake of the president’s attempted renovations.

Several months ago, Trump announced a plan to paint the floor of the pool blue, to match his vision of the National Mall. He handed a no-bid contract to a Virginia-based company, which proceeded to try to waterproof and paint the pool. Once that was finished, Trump drove his presidential motorcade down the empty pool in a show of triumph. Soon after, the pool was filled — and the trouble began.

The blue paint trapped heat, the heat spurred algae growth, and in short order the Reflecting Pool had turned green. There was nothing the White House could do about it. Misapplication of the new coating, meanwhile, had caused the floor to peel; chunks of it floated to the surface.

Unable to take responsibility for his own mistakes and failures, Trump blamed unnamed saboteurs and appears to have ordered the Department of Justice to press charges against them. Enter Hearn, who was accused of pulling off a piece of the pool’s liner. He was indicted by a grand jury on a federal vandalism charge and arrested.

But there was no evidence Hearn had done anything wrong. Instead, the problems at the pool were the product of poor work and quality control. Even the Department of Justice was forced to admit that the damage was the result of a “flawed installation.”

The U.S. attorney for Washington, D.C., Jeanine Pirro, dropped the charges. Trump was furious. “I disagree 100% with Jeanine Pirro, the U.S. attorney for the District of Columbia, on the Reflecting Pool,” Trump wrote on Truth Social. “I don’t know what she was thinking?” He wants a prosecution. He wants revenge.

Trump is hardly the first powerful person to abuse the law enforcement powers of the federal government to pursue narrow interests and petty grievances. Richard Nixon infamously turned both the F.B.I. and the I.R.S. against his political enemies. J. Edgar Hoover, as director of the F.B.I., used his authority to wage what amounted to a personal crusade against the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., whom he viewed as a dangerous subversive.

The story of the Trump administration is, as always, one of continuity with the worst parts of our past. And yet that continuity exists alongside novelty.

Both Nixon and Hoover cloaked their abuses of power in the language of necessity and national interest. They paid lip service to the rules and norms of constitutional government even as they treated them as obstacles to their own power. Committed to vice, they nonetheless feigned tribute to virtue.

Trump does no such thing. He does not see himself as a man in possession of an office, heading a government, so much as he sees himself as the government. The state is an extension of his person. He is the king, and it is one of his two bodies.

There is no observable national interest at work in the crusades against Abrego Garcia or Hearn. These are personal crusades, shaped entirely by Trump’s grievances, his desire for revenge, his insatiable need to soothe his own psychic wounds.

There are, to be sure, true believers within this administration, from the executive power fanatic Russell Vought to the far-right nativist Stephen Miller. But the man at the top has no such ambitions. He is there only for himself. The principal aim of his government as he sees it is his own glorification — a desperate quest to never lose face and to pursue vengeance against anyone who might undermine his sense of self.

Hence Trump’s failed war with Iran — a military failure and disastrous strategic mistake. There is no apparent plan to end the conflict, only the futile efforts of a president desperate to shed the stench of defeat. That is what the false negotiations and endless missile strikes are all about: a way to try to end the war without having lost it. Peace with honor, this time as something closer to farce.

The danger, of course, is what happens if there is no way out. What if Trump is truly stuck, fully caught in a trap of his own making?

With the terrible power of the United States at his fingertips, it is frightening to contemplate what he might do to save his fragile sense of self. He has already tried to wreck the country in pursuit of revenge against all those who challenge his ego and authority. There’s no reason to think that he won’t try to wreck the world in pursuit of the same.