It’s interesting how thoroughly terrible the protagonist of this character study is. The terribleness seeps everywhere and gets into all the corners and crevices and tiny little thumbtack holes. No possible terrible is overlooked.

Trump’s temper — honed over years as a public and political persona — hasn’t waned.

Attorney General Jeff Sessions bore the brunt of Trump’s most recently disclosed upbraiding. The New York Times reported this week that Trump, in front of multiple people, called his long-time supporter an “idiot.”

In the West Wing, Trump can be a temperamental commander-in-chief, prone to bursts of anger that dissipate as quickly as they came on. The rage is an extension of what many say they experienced on the campaign trail.

In other words, he’s abusive. He’s always been abusive – the piece starts with a fit of rage at employees in the 80s – and he carries on being abusive now that he’s in perhaps the single most responsible position in the world. A grown man who is “prone to bursts of anger” is abusive.

People who have been in meetings with the President describe a pattern for Trump’s outbursts. They arise without much warning — in keeping with Trump’s flair for the dramatic — making it difficult for those in the room to avoid situations where the businessman-turned-politician lets loose on his subordinates.

He’s not shy about singling out one particular aide for a lashing, even with others looking on. Fighting back rarely ends well, since there are few topics Trump won’t broach in his humiliating takedowns.

There. That’s the bit where every last crack is filled with terrible. He bursts into a rage unpredictably, he singles people out, he does it in front of others, and they can’t fight back because then he will just shame the victim. That right there describes a terrible human being.

It’s pathetic and shameful that no one has ever been able to tell him that adults don’t get to act like that; that money and money-power do nothing to make it ok for adults to act like that; that he has no right to treat people that way, period end of story.

One person who has been in meetings with Trump recalls the President displaying his “volcanic” temper when he “feels ganged up on” or when nobody tells him one of his ideas is good.

The tirades have, at times, left his staff shaken. After an angry phone call with the Australian prime minister in January, some of his staff were left white-faced after catching a first glimpse of his capacity for rage.

That’s a bad man. He enjoys making people feel afraid and shaken. That’s bad.

[A]s Trump developed an outsized persona as a real estate developer and later as a television celebrity, it wasn’t kindness that formed his reputation. It was anger in all its shades: the fury-filled executive, the high-maintenance billionaire, the pugnacious Twitter troll.

As Trump rants and raves through his first eight months in office, his penchant for outbursts has persisted. The isolation of the White House, paired with the enveloping cloud of the Russia investigations, have caused Trump to brood and bellow with unpredictable results.

Outbursts at his most loyal underlings have become commonplace. Multiple men of distinction, with long careers in public service, say the dressings-down that have sprung from Trump’s lips are the most demeaning they’ve enduring in their adult lives.

He’s abusive. That stuff he does is abuse.