Even if only intuitively, Donald Trump knows that the White House is a storehouse of power. He understands that, like the government itself, it is an institution that our impartial democratic system has spent two centuries nurturing and investing in. And this is why he wants it to be his, as surely as he wants the government to be his and as surely as he wants the government’s money to be his.

There was a moment at which he tipped his hand on this, when he made explicit what had already become obvious. It came during his 2020 acceptance speech for the Republican presidential nomination — a speech that, like his Jan. 6 speech five months later, was delivered from the White House complex itself. It was a blatant violation of the longstanding expectation that the White House wouldn’t be used for political purposes, an expectation that had created far bigger headaches for other politicians who engaged in far smaller violations.

During the 2020 speech, he was reading the standard self-celebratory litany from the teleprompter when he went off script for a moment.

“The fact is, I’m here—” he said, pausing as applause from the prior line interrupted him. But then he seemed to find import in that truncated line itself. He turned to the White House behind him, gesturing at it. “What’s the name of that building?”