Until Wednesday night, Donald Trump and people in his orbit insisted that the president had known nothing about the $130,000 hush money payment to the pornographic film star Stormy Daniels made by his lawyer and fixer, Michael Cohen, days before the 2016 election. Last month on Air Force One, a reporter asked Trump about it directly: “Did you know about the $130,000 payment to Stormy Daniels?” His response was a categorical no.

This denial was always implausible, and now we have new evidence that Trump was lying. On Wednesday evening, Rudy Giuliani, whose appointment to Trump’s legal team was announced two weeks ago, appeared on Sean Hannity’s Fox News show and casually admitted that Trump had repaid Cohen for the money he gave to Daniels “over a period of several months.”

This was a bombshell. And in the 12 hours that followed, both Trump and Giuliani made a series of statements so seemingly self-sabotaging and undisciplined that observers began searching for some sort of hidden strategy or logic. Were they trying to get out ahead of a coming revelation? To set off a metaphorical smoke bomb that would distract from some other scandalous development? Or were they really as blundering and incompetent as they appeared?

I suspect the answer is a combination of the three. But their motivations are less important than the information they’ve provided us. Whether they realize it or not, experts say they appear to have admitted that Trump and Cohen broke the law. The question is whether the impunity that Trump has enjoyed so far will hold or whether this farce of a presidency will, at long last, begin to crumble under the weight of its own sleaze.