The Cohen result is likely even more damaging to the president, because he has directly implicated Trump in a crime. Cohen’s plea seemed, at first, to be a lucky break for Trump—the former fixer wasn’t cooperating with prosecutors. His statements in open court turned out to be highly damaging anyway. In pleading guilty to violations of campaign-finance laws, Cohen said that the then-candidate Trump had directed him to do so, arranging payments to two women who alleged affairs with Trump in order to hush them up and affect the result of the 2016 election.

Throughout his presidency, the specter of criminality has stalked the halls of the White House. It has been clear that the president was surrounded by a coterie of corrupt and sometimes criminal aides, bereft of scruples. There has also been ample evidence to suggest collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia. Yet the president has often managed to stay just out of direct contact with any of these problems. Before Cohen, he himself hadn’t been directly implicated in a crime, and he said he wasn’t aware of the June 2016 Trump Tower meeting, or any number of other contacts with Russians. By wholly abandoning Harry Truman’s credo that the buck stops with him, the president has sought to sidestep any accountability for his many aides’ many bad behaviors.

In debating whether collusion is a crime, Trump and Giuliani are successfully changing the subject.

Meanwhile, Democrats, the White House, and the media have all put the most emphasis on accusations of collusion, rather than more mundane crimes like Cohen’s. For the press, the le Carré-esque international intrigue of Russian interference in elections is too much to resist. Democrats have picked up on it to question Trump’s patriotism. Retired intelligence officers have frantically sounded the alarm about Russia, while no similar group of wise men exists to hype financial crimes à la Cohen. The White House, apparently confident that there was no criminal collusion—or that Mueller won’t find any evidence of it—has been happy to fight on this battlefield rather than another.

Cohen’s plea changes that. While he is not the most trustworthy narrator—he is now a convicted fraudster, of course—his account of working with Trump to pay off Stormy Daniels and Karen McDougal and to cover up the payments rings true with all of the available evidence about the hush money. Besides that, prosecutors would not have accepted Cohen’s plea if they didn’t have high confidence that he was being truthful.

Reports from within the White House by Politico and The New York Times show the depth of fear that Tuesday instilled in the president’s aides. But it doesn’t require talking to West Wing staffers to understand the trouble facing the president. The administration’s lines of defense demonstrate it just as clearly. Trump’s allies have long acted like he is guilty, and now they’re becoming more explicit about it.