I have to pose the question out loud: Is the attorney general of the United States trying to get himself fired by the president?

It wouldn’t seem to make sense. AG Jeff Sessions could have provoked Donald J. Trump to fire him by refusing to fire Deputy FBI Director Andrew McCabe just before he was to retire from the government; he fired McCabe anyway.

Then again, Sessions did recuse himself from anything to do with the Russia probe, given his previous work on the Trump presidential campaign and on its transition after the 2016 election.

Sessions’s recusal enraged the president, who has mocked, threatened and disparaged him ever since. Indeed, Sessions acted properly by recusing himself, which I consider to be a highly principled decision — something that is quite foreign to the president.

Now comes the latest move to poke Trump in the eye. Sessions has selected a Utah prosecutor to assist in the probe of allegations of abuse at the Justice Department. Political conservatives wanted him to appoint a special counsel, which is what Deputy AG Rod Rosenstein did when he selected Robert Mueller to lead the investigation into whether Russia meddled in our 2016 presidential election.

Trump is quite likely angry about Sessions’s refusal to pick a special counsel, which begs the question: What is the president going to do about it? More to the point: What would he dare do about it?

Given that Trump has virtually zero self-awareness, or sense of irony, or virtually any principles on which he relies (other than what works to his political advantage), I would put nothing past Trump.

He could fire Sessions on Easter. He could do it via Twitter, which is the way the “stable genius” handles these sensitive personnel matters.

The president and the AG have what has been called charitably a “complicated relationship.” It appears to be getting more complicated each day, or whenever the attorney general does something that suggests he works for the public — and not just for the man who appointed him.