The biggest revelation from Michael Cohen’s guilty plea on Tuesday was the assertion that Donald Trump directed him to commit campaign finance felonies.

The implications of this allegation are that then-candidate Trump himself committed a number of crimes. The response to this news—that the president is directly implicated in felonies that carry prison sentences—has been met among Trump’s staunchest allies with a typical shrug.

Some, though, have sought to at least attempt to craft a legal defense for the president’s seemingly illegal actions. These defenses—which might or might not ever be necessary—are wildly unconvincing. They broke down into three variants:

Defense One: Cohen didn’t implicate Trump.

This initial position was tossed out in the immediate aftermath of the guilty plea by Trump’s current attorney, Rudy Giuliani. “There is no allegation of any wrongdoing against the President in the government’s charges against Mr. Cohen,” Giuliani stated Tuesday evening.

It’s true that the government’s filings never say explicitly that Donald Trump committed a crime. Cohen’s criminal information filing describes him as having committed his campaign finance offenses on behalf of “Individual-1.” That is Donald Trump. It also says that Cohen “coordinated with one or more members of the campaign” to plot illegal payments to cover up alleged affairs, conducting “meetings and phone calls, about the fact, nature, and timing of the payments.” Again, the filing never says Trump was one of the individuals Cohen coordinated with.

Cohen, though, himself implicated Trump personally in open court. Trump’s former attorney swore under oath that he made a hush money payment “in coordination with and at the direction of a candidate for federal office” and “for the principal purpose of influencing the election.” Again, that candidate would be Donald Trump. Giuliani has confirmed as much, saying that Trump was aware of and reimbursed Cohen for the payment to Stormy Daniels, contrary to Trump’s initial public claims. Trump was also secretly recorded during the campaign by Cohen discussing a possible payment to acquire the rights to Karen McDougal’s story about their alleged affair.

So to suggest that Trump was not implicated in wrongdoing by Tuesday’s news, as Giuliani did, is untrue.

Defense Two: It wasn’t a crime.

The latest iteration of this argument was articulated by lawyer Alan Dershowitz on MSNBC on Wednesday morning.

Here’s what he said:

The president is entitled to pay hush money to anyone he wants during a campaign. There are no restrictions on what a candidate can contribute to his own campaign. So if in fact the president instructed Cohen to do it as his lawyer, and was going to compensate him for it, the president committed no crime.

This argument seems to be that if Trump was involved in the payment, then it would be a lawful donation because there are no limits on what a candidate can contribute to his own campaign. This ignores a number of things: First, Cohen was reimbursed for the campaign payments by the Trump Organization, not the candidate himself. This would be why Cohen pleaded guilty to facilitating an illegal corporate contribution. Trump as the head of the Trump Organization, would be implicated in that crime.

That’s not all, though. If what Cohen said is true, then the candidate could also be guilty of engaging in a conspiracy with Cohen to make an illicit corporate donation and to circumvent reporting requirements.

Defense Three: Obama did it too.

This was the one that Trump latched onto himself, first in a morning tweet.

Michael Cohen plead guilty to two counts of campaign finance violations that are not a crime. President Obama had a big campaign finance violation and it was easily settled! — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 22, 2018

Later, in an interview with Fox News, Trump repeated this argument. “If you look at President Obama, he had a massive campaign violation,” he said.

Yes, Obama did pay a fine of $375,000 to the Federal Election Commission for failure to meet reporting deadlines on more than $1.8 million in large donations received right before the election and for failure to meet deadlines to return some contributions that exceeded the legal limit. This was roughly comparable to a $100,000 fine Bob Dole paid for similar violations during his 1996 presidential campaign.

As New York Times reporter Ken Vogel pointed out on Twitter, the difference between these types of fairly common infractions and what Cohen did is the difference between a hefty fine and a lengthy prison sentence. Cohen said that he knowingly and willfully made illegal contributions at Trump’s direction and with the intention of hiding the purpose of the payments, which makes his offense criminal. Obama and Dole said that their violations were accidental bureaucratic mistakes, and so they were handed civil penalties. Trump himself had a similar apparent civil infraction for the 2016 campaign on $1.3 million in donations, but nobody is going to jail for that.

Ultimately, Trump’s fate is likely to be decided not in a courtroom, but in the political arena. Until now, his supporters have shown a willingness to swallow any excuse and ignore any malfeasance. It’s unclear that this will change, no matter what his defense is.