By Timothy L. O’Brien / Bloomberg Opinion

Donald Trump spent Monday night at his Trump Tower triplex in Manhattan before facing criminal charges the next afternoon in a local courtroom. When his public humiliation was over, he found his way to his private jet and flew to Florida to his other longtime refuge, a villa at his Palm Beach country club, Mar-a-Lago.

A carnival barker first and a public servant never, Trump used Mar-a-Lago as a backdrop for an incendiary call-to-arms on Tuesday evening. It was his most sweeping attempt to control the narrative — and dictate ground rules for Trump cultists — following his legal reckoning. He stayed true to form: The speech was a stew of anger, resentment, emotional flotsam and dangerous psychobabble.

He attacked law enforcement and regurgitated myths about electoral fraud. “Our country is going to hell,” he said, standing amid a phalanx of stars-and-stripes. Invoking some of the American carnage tropes of his 2017 inauguration speech, he toyed with antisemitic rhetoric, warned of nuclear Armageddon and tagged Black prosecutors as racists. Trump faces substantial and myriad lawsuits and investigations beyond Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg’s slender prosecution, but he recklessly slagged many of them.

“We are a nation in decline, and now these radical left lunatics want to interfere in elections by using law enforcement,” he advised. “We can’t let that happen.”

He was weary and mirthless throughout. He slurred some of his lines, gave shout-outs to his children and let the world know that his son Barron “is tall, but he’s smart.” He referred to himself in the third person and said he planned to fight on all fronts. “The criminal is the district attorney,” he allowed. He said the federal prosecutor examining the Jan. 6, 2021, siege and his possible misappropriation of classified documents was a “lunatic.” He attacked the judge hearing the New York case; and made targets of the judge’s wife and daughter, too. A corrupt legal system was trying to crush him, after all. “It’s right out of the old Soviet Union,” he said. “That’s where we are.”

He ended his show with a series of fist pumps and then wandered away.

Given Trump’s personal, business and political histories, Mar-a-Lago was an appropriate stage for all of this. Trump has essentially fled Trump Tower and the city where he was born, bred and made, for friendlier Southern climes. Don-From-Queens now considers himself a Floridian. It’s an arc other Americans have traced, of course, and for many Florida is just a warmer, tax-friendlier place to hang out. But nobody else — really, absolutely nobody — has journeyed from outer-borough developer, to Manhattan tabloid fixture, to marital basket case and punchline, to TV star and entrepreneurial guru, to social media conspiracy theorist, to U.S. president, to insurrectionist and authoritarian avatar. Nobody. And therein lies a tale.

Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago are bookends of Trump’s nearly 77-year bacchanalia and they chart — albeit in snapshots — how he became such a consummate wrecking ball.

Donald Trump’s early professional years were built on the successes of his father, Fred. Donald inherited Fred’s wealth and political and business connections. Fred had also been booted from lucrative public housing contracts because of graft, and he blamed the government rather than himself for his excommunication. So Donald inherited Fred’s loathing of public authority as well.

Trump Tower was Donald’s first major independent success, and while he relied on Fred for momentum, he was the one who assembled the complicated site, oversaw its design, ran roughshod over its workers, ignored architectural preservationists, created his family’s new nest in its upper reaches and orchestrated publicity around it. Fred visited the construction site, but Trump Tower was Donald’s show. When it opened in 1984, it offered the 38-year-old his first intoxicating taste of national fame.

Trump bought Mar-a-Lago, a sprawling estate fronting the Atlantic Ocean, a year after Trump Tower opened. I spent a lot of time in both buildings with Trump, and he always prided himself on their equally baroque, ludicrous splendor. He delighted in pointing out their various appointments as heralds of his ascent: a masterpiece that wasn’t a masterpiece in Trump Tower; Walt Disney tile designs in a Mar-a-Lago nursery that weren’t actually Disney’s designs.

Mar-a-Lago was also one of the first stops in a willy-nilly, debt-fueled spending spree that eventually caused Trump’s finances to collapse so thoroughly that he needed handouts from his father and siblings to stay afloat. Less than a decade after Trump Tower opened, Trump was negotiating with creditors.

Trump Tower and Mar-a-Lago were so dear to him that when he flirted with personal bankruptcy in the early 1990s and saw his real estate and casino holdings dismantled, he pleaded with bankers to spare his triplex and Palm Beach home. He managed to pull that off, although he had to convert Mar-a-Lago into a members-only club so he could afford to hold on to it. Still, they were his.

Trump spent the years between bankruptcy and his presidency rebounding financially and recasting himself as a business sage on TV. “The Apprentice” boardroom was fake, but plenty of viewers thought it was his command center in Trump Tower. Trump reveled in being an ambassador for a certain kind of New Yorker and busily cultivated relationships with the city’s power brokers and the media. Critics and competitors found themselves on the blunt end of frivolous lawsuits. Trump didn’t entirely escape the common perception that he was a buffoon until he found more malleable and pliable fans on social media.

In the years preceding his presidency, he embraced and promulgated conspiracy theories. Like his father, he thought everybody — brown or yellow, Ivy-educated or in the government — was trying to steal his candy. He spent more time on his golf courses and in Florida, with New York evolving into an afterthought. The streets outside Trump Tower were routinely surrounded by barricades during his presidency. Many New Yorkers — the same ones who once indulged him because they were in on the joke — openly and vigorously disdained him.

Trump — who also used to be in on the joke — absorbed all of that, and his mood curdled. He, his wife and his children uprooted themselves, eventually all but disowning New York. Mar-a-Lago became the place where he could walk out to dinner every evening to rounds of applause and where he could stash White House documents. Positive reinforcement.

The Trump Tower aerie Trump slept in on Monday night undoubtedly had ghosts keeping the former president company. I suspect he was relieved the stay was short. The Mar-a-Lago ballroom on Tuesday evening was stocked with ghouls, some of whom applauded Trump’s most obscene and inflammatory remarks. I suspect he was content to be back among them. Their energy is helping him pave the way to bedlam, the place he has always been happiest calling home.

Timothy L. O’Brien is senior executive editor of Bloomberg Opinion. A former editor and reporter for the New York Times, he is author of “TrumpNation: The Art of Being the Donald.”