This week, President Donald Trump made it clear, as he often does, that he doesn’t think much of certain American laws—“horrible, horrible, and very unsafe laws,” as he put it, on Tuesday, in speaking of the rules at our border. At another event, that same day, he called those laws “so weak and so pathetic,” by which he seemed to have meant, in a Trumpian paradox, that they were so strong that they kept him from doing what he wanted to do. That also seems to have been his issue with the federal courts’ interpretations of the Due Process and Equal Protection clauses of the Constitution—the highest law in the land—which keep frustrating his attempts to institute a travel ban. Sometimes laws let other people do too much for his liking, which appears to be why, in January, he called American libel laws “a sham and a disgrace.” Those remarks came a day after Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer, sued BuzzFeed for defamation, for publishing what has become known as the Steele Dossier. (The dossier included references to Cohen that, he says, are demonstrably false.) They came two days before the Wall Street Journal first reported that Cohen was involved in making a payment of a hundred and thirty thousand dollars to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film star whose proper name is Stephanie Clifford. And Clifford’s case, in turn, reveals something about Trump’s contempt for even the basics of contract law—never more so than on Thursday, when the President spoke publicly about the story for the first time.

Trump was talking to a group of reporters on Air Force One when someone asked if he’d known about Cohen’s payment to Clifford. “No,” Trump replied.

“So why did Michael Cohen make it, if there was no truth to the allegation?” the reporter asked.

“You have to ask Michael Cohen. Michael Cohen is my”—Trump paused for a moment—“attorney. You’ll have to ask Michael.”

Does Trump realize that, in this context, the phrase “Michael Cohen is my attorney” does not dispense with the need for further explanations? Indeed, it demands them—not least about what Trump thinks that an attorney for a man like him is empowered to do, and whose funds he can use to do it.

“Do you know where he got the money to make the payment?” the reporter asked.

“No, I don’t know,” Trump replied.

There’s no angle from which this isn’t an extraordinary exchange. To begin with, the point of the payment was to keep Clifford from talking about a sexual encounter that she says she had with Trump. (Trump’s lawyers and spokespeople have denied the affair.) Cohen transferred the money less than two weeks before the Presidential election. That’s a lot of money for the President’s personal lawyer to be doling out at that juncture, both because of campaign-finance laws (which have rules about in-kind contributions and limits on individual giving) and because of basic prudence and common sense. Also, more than once, Cohen has publicly said that the money came from his personal funds. Has Trump not read those reports?

More than that, the money was being given on Trump’s behalf—or, at least, on behalf of “David Dennison,” the pseudonym used for him in the contract outlining the hush agreement with Clifford. This is where the President’s concept of contracts seems to get particularly hazy. The hush agreement was not a simple cash-for-silence transaction. It lays out what “Dennison” was giving Clifford (or “Peggy Peterson”—the pseudonyms are specified in a side letter to the agreement) in addition to the money, such as guarantees that he would not sue her for statements in earlier years; only Trump could give her that assurance.

Trump didn’t sign the agreement, although, as drafted, there are multiple passages requiring him to do so. If the empty signature line is meant to be proof that Trump really didn’t know about the agreement, then it would, like his comments on the plane, be evidence that Cohen defrauded Clifford and was in outright violation of legal ethics rules that oblige lawyers to tell their clients when they are doing significant things on their behalf. (Remarkably, Cohen’s own lawyer has also said that Trump wasn’t a party to the agreement, saying that the signature line was just meant to give him the “option” of joining it. Cohen’s legal team has made a similar argument in legal filings.)

And yet Trump has joined a lawsuit, in federal court, to enforce the agreement that he didn’t sign and says he knew nothing about. Clifford’s lawyer, Michael Avenatti, has said that, at this point, he will need to depose Trump to sort out the basic facts of the case, starting with who actually agreed to the hush agreement. Given the contradictions and the illogic in the Trump team’s account (and in the document itself), that may be right. Clifford is now also suing Trump and Cohen for defamation; Summer Zervos, a former contestant on “The Apprentice,” has also filed a defamation suit against Trump. After Zervos said, before the election, that Trump had harassed her, and other women shared similar stories, Trump said that their accounts were “lies” and “a hundred per cent fabricated.” His lawyers say that those responses were just Trump’s “non-defamatory opinions.” Where all of that figures into his theory of libel law is, as ever with Trump, hard to say.

Publicly, Trump seems incurious about what Cohen did or what he promised in order to get the deal done. (Privately, he had dinner with Cohen the night before “60 Minutes” aired an interview with Clifford.) But, if Trump believes that his lawyer, going off on his own, can bind Clifford to such a deal, he might need to look at how such deals, under the law, bind or implicate him. The agreements that he’s working on now include treaties with foreign powers and compromises with Congress. To judge from his statements this week, they might also involve arrangements or payments that take place at the edge of his peripheral vision, or after Trump, pointing at someone, leaves the room, saying, “He’s my attorney.”