With his impulsive behavior and chronic aversion to the truth, Donald Trump has created endless challenges for his White House staff during the past fifteen and a half months. But with the tumultuous arrival of Rudy Giuliani, supposedly as a member of his legal team, Trump has found himself cast in an unfamiliar role—as part of a White House cleanup crew. On Friday, he sought to excuse some of Giuliani’s recent utterances while also intimating that some of them had been inaccurate.

“Rudy is a great guy, but he just started a day ago,” Trump told the White House press pool on Friday morning as he prepared to fly to Dallas to address the National Rifle Association. “He really has his heart into it, he’s working hard, he’s learning the subject matter. And he’s going to be issuing a statement, too, but he is a great guy. He knows it’s a witch hunt. That’s what he knows. He’s seen a lot of them, and he said he’s never seen anything so horrible.” At this point, Trump entered into a discussion of Hillary Clinton’s e-mails—it was, after all, a day ending in “Y”—before returning to Giuliani and reiterating his point: “He started yesterday. He’ll get his facts straight. He’s a great guy.”

The President had been left with little option but to address the brush fire that Giuliani had sparked during the previous thirty-six hours, starting with his statements, on Wednesday night on Sean Hannity’s Fox News program, where he discussed how the President repaid Michael Cohen, his personal attorney, for the hundred-and-thirty-thousand-dollar payment that Cohen made to the porn actress Stormy Daniels shortly before the 2016 election, and the President’s motivation for firing the former F.B.I. director, James Comey. The mess that Giuliani is in can’t be explained away as the result of a single slip of the tongue. During an appearance on “Fox & Friends” on Thursday morning, Giuliani seemed to concede that the payment Cohen made to Daniels was directly related to the 2016 election, thus raising the question of whether the transaction violated campaign laws.

On Friday night, the Wall Street Journal reported that Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, was “furious” after Giuliani’s interview with Hannity. The Washington Post reported that “there is sensitivity among counsel Donald McGahn and others about the Comey firing, an official said, and Giuliani’s comments were seen as ‘not helpful.’ ” The Times, citing two sources close to Trump, said that the President “was displeased with how Mr. Giuliani, a former New York mayor, conducted himself, and . . . was also unhappy with Mr. Hannity.”

On Friday, a source close to Jared Kushner, the President’s son-in-law and adviser, told The New Yorker that Kushner, too, is furious at Giuliani. During the former mayor’s interview with Hannity, Giuliani suggested that Kushner might be “disposable.” On Saturday afternoon, a White House official denied there was any antagonism between Kushner and Giuliani. “Jared has positive and warm feelings towards Rudy, and believes he has been a loyal Trump supporter since early on,” the official told me. “When he saw the interview he took Rudy’s comments about him to be a joke. He doesn’t engage in the President’s legal strategy.”

Independent legal experts have said that Giuliani’s remarks could create a number of problems for the President. On Friday, Giuliani issued a statement that was clearly intended to repair some of the damage he had done. “There was no campaign violation,” it said. “The payment was made to resolve a personal and false allegation in order to protect the President’s family. It would have been done in any event, whether he was a candidate or not. “

Giuliani also said that the references he had made to the timing of the payment “were not describing my understanding of the President’s knowledge, but instead, my understanding of these matters.” This language is tortured, and hard to parse, but, as the Washington Post pointed out, “The distinction is important because if Giuliani publicly described a private conversation with the president, he might have inadvertently waived attorney-client privilege on that conversation, potentially opening the door for prosecutors to probe further into what was said.”

Finally, Giuliani’s statement obliquely addressed his suggestion that Trump fired Comey because of his refusal to say publicly that the President wasn’t a target of the agency’s Russia probe—a claim that seemed to support the theory that Trump was seeking to interfere in the investigation. “It is undisputed that the President’s dismissal of former Director Comey—an inferior executive officer—was clearly within his Article II power,” the statement said. “Recent revelations about former Director Comey further confirm the wisdom of the President’s decision, which was plainly in the best interests of our nation.”

The statement didn’t dispel the general impression that Giuliani had really mucked things up. Even Michael Cohen criticized his performance, telling Donny Deutsch, the New York ad man and cable-television host, that Giuliani “doesn’t always know what he is talking about.” Appearing on MSNBC on Friday, Deutsch predicted that Giuliani would be gone within a couple of weeks.

As Trump has amply demonstrated, he is perfectly capable of making rapid-fire personnel decisions. But on Friday, at least, he seemed willing to cut Giuliani a bit of slack. The most convincing explanation for this is that, although Trump might not like the reaction that Giuliani’s words have provoked, the former mayor is basically doing his bidding: Giuliani reportedly talked to Trump before revealing that the President repaid Cohen, and he has echoed Trump in adopting an increasingly hostile stance toward the Mueller investigation. At this point, Trump’s primary legal strategy is a public-relations one, wherein the entire Russia probe is portrayed as a partisan plot. This is the rationale for refusing to agree to an interview with the special counsel. (Perhaps ultimately this argument will be used to justify firing Mueller and Rod Rosenstein, the deputy Attorney General.) “Bottom line, I want to talk to the people in charge if they can prove that it’s a fair situation,” Trump told the press on Friday. “The problem we have is that you have thirteen people, and they are all Democrats. And they are real Democrats. They are angry Democrats. And that’s not a fair situation.” (Mueller is a Republican, of course, as is Rosenstein.)

While Giuliani’s legal skills appear to be rusty, he is eager to play the role of Trump’s attack dog, just as he did during the Presidential campaign. In the past few days, he’s demonstrated anew his willingness to sink into the gutter, and he’s even impugned the law-enforcement agencies he once worked with. In his interview with Hannity, Giuliani called Comey “a very perverted man,” and he compared the F.B.I. agents who exercised search warrants on Cohen’s hotel room and office to “storm troopers.” In another interview, on Thursday, Giuliani claimed that there’s a “witch hunt” going on at the Justice Department.

From a legal perspective, such outrageous provocations make little sense. They seem likely only to deepen the resolve of Mueller and his team. But Trump sees himself as being engaged primarily in a political power struggle, and he evidently liked the idea of having Giuliani in place to echo some of his own attack lines. This week, though, the Don & Rudy Show opened to terrible reviews. Now the question is how long its creator will allow it to run.

This post has been updated to include the White House’s comments about Giuliani and Kushner.