Director of National Intelligence Dan Coats was being interviewed onstage at the Aspen Security Forum Thursday when Donald Trump’s press secretary, Sarah Huckabee Sanders, announced that Russian President Vladimir Putin had been invited to the White House and that “discussions were already underway” for a second summit. Coats, a former Republican senator and diplomat, was clearly stunned when his interlocutor, NBC’s Andrea Mitchell, broke the news to him. “Say that again. Did I hear you?” he asked. “O.K., that’s going to be special.”

All of a sudden, the conversation took on the contours of an exit interview. Coats, after all, had protested forcefully when Trump, during his joint press conference with Putin on Monday, publicly denigrated the United States intelligence community that Coats leads. “We have been clear in our assessments of Russian meddling in the 2016 election and their ongoing, pervasive efforts to undermine our democracy, and we will continue to provide unvarnished and objective intelligence in support of our national security,” he wrote in a statement that was reportedly not cleared by the White House.

The strong response whipped up speculation that Coats might be eyeing an exit. According to The Washington Post, senior administration officials were so worried that the national intelligence director was primed to resign that they implored the president to offer Coats a vote of confidence. During an interview with CBS Evening News’s Jeff Glor on Wednesday, Trump praised Coats by name.

At the Aspen Security Forum the following day, however, Coats remained calmly defiant—seemingly at peace in his criticism of the president. He candidly expressed his frustration that he did not know what was said during the more than two hours Trump spent with Putin behind closed doors, telling Mitchell, “I would’ve suggested a different way.” At another point, when asked whether he had considered resigning, Coats paused. “That’s a place I don’t want to go to publicly,” he said, ramping up to the textbook nondenial denial. “Are there days when you go, ‘ugh, what am I doing?’ Yeah. . . . As long as I have the ability to see the truth and speak the truth, I’m on board.”

As one senior White House official told the Post, “Coats has gone rogue.” For many White House watchers, the only remaining question is whether Trump will defenestrate Coats before he can flee. Sources close to Trump told Axios that “they’re already speculating about whether Trump ends up firing Coats,” and that “Trump has never had much affection for Coats.”

Coats, of course, is only expressing publicly what many Trump aides are whispering in private. One administration official told me that National Security Council staffers were “pretty rattled by the summit” and that morale is “back down to very low levels.” Over in Foggy Bottom, a State Department staffer told me “lots of folks are planning an exit” in the wake of the Trump-Putin summit. Politico reports that the sentiment within the administration recalls the aftermath of Trump’s controversial Charlottesville comments. “People are just depressed,” said one Republican close to the White House. “Nobody wants to take on the public heat of resigning right now, but there are a bunch of people who were thinking maybe they’d leave after the midterms who are very seriously starting to consider accelerating their timetable.”