Nor could you be blithe about the obstruction-of-justice investigation, which may be integrated with the Russia probe to some degree but also appears to be distinct in important respects. When Mueller listed the areas he wants to discuss with Trump, obstruction issues dominated the list. These are questions that touch the president’s personal behavior intimately. And the president’s legal team, almost unfathomably, was caught flat-footed by the scope and extent of White House Counsel Don McGahn’s cooperation with Mueller. For all of Rudy Giuliani’s bluster, the Trump defense team appears to have relatively little sense of where this investigation stands or what to expect from it—save that they seem to expect some kind of damaging report at some point and don’t expect Mueller to indict the president.

And now there’s the Cohen investigation. The most damaging thing that happened yesterday to Trump was not that his former lawyer alleged under oath that Trump had directed him in the commission of crimes. It was that the United States Department of Justice allowed him to enter a guilty plea whose factual basis was that Trump had directed him in the commission of a crime. That is to say that the significance of the Cohen plea is not merely that Cohen alleges that Trump had him arrange to pay hush money to a porn star and a model in a specific effort to influence the election with illegal corporate contributions. It’s that the Justice Department believes this allegation to be true and is willing to proceed criminally against Cohen on that basis. That’s ominous for both Trump personally and for his campaign. What’s more, this particular front in the war is not under Mueller, who spun it off to the U.S. attorney’s office in the Southern District of New York. This is not, in other words, a problem Trump can fire his way out of. The SDNY has a lot more than 17 prosecutors; and whether they are angry or not, Democrats or not, they are not going away.

The situation gets worse for the president—because nobody, including him, has much idea when the next blow is coming or along which of these fronts. On any given day, we could see a subpoena for the president’s grand-jury testimony, which would provoke major litigation, assuming the president decides not to accede to it. At any point—perhaps today, perhaps a week from now, perhaps after the midterm elections—Mueller’s grand jury could issue its next indictments, likely involving people on this side of the Atlantic. And, of course, nobody knows how quickly, if at all, the Southern District might choose to move against other Trump-world figures who are mentioned in yesterday’s Cohen plea filings or what they might seek to do with Cohen’s allegations against Trump himself.

There’s one more reason why nobody will tell the mad king the hopeless truth that he’s surrounded, outmanned, outgunned, and that there’s no telling from where or when the next blow will come: The king is mad and doesn’t want to hear it. And his courtiers, seeking his favor, have either to convince themselves or play along with it. They do this both in talks with him privately and in their public utterances—to show loyalty, or because they are well paid to do so.

And thus we wait.

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