It was possibly, from his viewpoint, the third best day of the Trump presidency.

Even the press behemoth praised him in February for becoming president when he stuck to a teleprompter addressing a joint session of Congress and in April when his after-dinner entertainment at Mar-a-Lago, over “the most beautiful piece of chocolate cake that you’ve ever seen,” was raining Tomahawks on Syria. “Trump Appears Dazzled by Being Able to Bomb Syria Over Dessert,” read The Washington Post’s headline.

We knew Trump was too big to be confined by Infrastructure Week. Infrastructure doesn’t get good ratings. But a nasty gunfight between a starchy, cautious lawman and a louche loose cannon does.

The Senate hearing on Trump’s White House nest of vipers drew nearly 20 million viewers — more than the N.B.A. finals. People started lining up to see the hearing in person at 4 a.m. Even Preet Bharara, another law enforcement officer ousted by Trump, wanted in. Washington bars held special screening parties.

Who is bigger than Trump?

Sure, he got called a liar by the ousted F.B.I. chief, in what was “almost certainly the most damning j’accuse moment by a senior law enforcement official against a president in a generation,” as Peter Baker wrote in The New York Times.

Sure, the president came across in Comey’s testimony like a mob don, demanding fealty and calling on Comey to do him a service by seeing his way clear to letting the nefarious Michael Flynn go.

But on the bright side for Trump — which is a historically low bar — there were these things:

Comey admitted he was a leaker, and Trump is obsessed with catching leakers even though he’s a world-class leaker himself. They are their own Deep Throats.

Comey confirmed that he had told the president three times that he was not under investigation.

He asserted that Loretta Lynch lost her credibility on the Hillary email investigation when she let Bill Clinton on her plane and directed Comey to call it “a matter” rather than “an investigation.”