With Donald Trump, the tells are always easy.

When the president says, “I’m, like, a smart person,” you know he nurses deep insecurities about his intelligence. When he says, “I’m really rich,” you know that he knows that you know that, really, he probably isn’t.

And when he writes, as he did in his letter to the now-former F.B.I. director, James B. Comey, that “while I greatly appreciate you informing me, on three separate occasions, that I am not under investigation,” you know what keeps him up at night, too.

That wasn’t the only tell in Trump’s Comey canning. First there was its abruptness. Rod Rosenstein, deputy attorney general as of two weeks ago, delivered his memorandum detailing Comey’s misfeasance in the Hillary Clinton email saga on Tuesday. Trump fired the director the same day.

Come again? This is the same administration that waited 18 long days to fire a national security adviser profoundly vulnerable to Russian blackmail. Why? Because, as Press Secretary Sean Spicer explained earlier this week, the White House felt it owed Michael Flynn an “element of due process.”