As billowing rumors that Donald Trump was considering firing special counsel Robert Mueller engulfed Washington, temporarily overshadowing Tuesday’s testimony at separate congressional hearings from Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein and Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the president stood before a gaggle of reporters at the White House and refused to confirm his support for Mueller, fueling the spiraling speculation with a calculated purpose.

The claim that Trump wants to terminate Mueller, divulged by the chief executive of Newsmax Media and friend of Trump, Christopher Ruddy, was predictably accompanied by paltry bickering within the White House, as The New York Times reports. Ruddy claimed he went public with the story to prevent his pal from making a rash decision. Trump’s team seems to have different ideas, implying that, in its leader’s eyes, Ruddy has committed the most sacrilegious of sins: attempting to hoist himself into the media spotlight by invoking the president’s name.

Indeed, in a cooly worded statement, Press Secretary Sean Spicer said, “Mr. Ruddy never spoke to the president regarding this issue.” Ruddy hit back: “It is a sad commentary that Sean Spicer spends so much of his time objecting to my comments at the same time he has done such a poor job in defending the president and promoting his many accomplishments,” he said, perhaps concerned that his Mar-a-Lago tête à têtes with Trump might now become less collegial.

Speaking before a joint House and Senate Appropriations Subcommittee, Rosenstein struck a more somber tone, assuring the lawmakers that he was aware of “no secret plan” to oust Mueller. The decision to fire the special counsel would rest with him alone, he said, despite conjecture that Trump could fire him if he did not acquiesce to orders, or repeal the regulations that govern the appointment and fire Mueller himself. “As long as I’m in this position, he’s not going to be fired without good cause,” Rosenstein testified. “I’m not going to follow any orders unless I believe those are lawful and appropriate orders.

“Director Mueller is going to have the full independence he needs to conduct that investigation properly.”

Rosenstein’s testimony was in less than perfect alignment with what White House spokeswoman Sarah Huckabee Sanders told reporters on Air Force One as she proceeded to undercut the deputy attorney general. “While the president has every right [to fire Mueller], he has no intention to do so.”

But with a president as erratic as Trump, intention is a handily fluid concept. According to the Times, the president began toying with the idea of dismissing Mueller shortly after he was appointed following the dismissal F.B.I. director James Comey, who was, at the time, overseeing the Russia investigation. So far, Trump has reportedly been dissuaded from doing so by several staff members and advisers, who are acutely conscious of the sheer violence of the scandal that would likely erupt were he to pull the trigger.

Chief of Staff Reince Preibus—considered a casualty-in-waiting in a supposedly imminent White House staff shake up—is virulently opposed to the idea, the Times reports, while Trump’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, who is said to have supported Comey’s firing, has adopted a more temperate tone toward the Mueller question. Speaker of the House Paul Ryan has advised Trump to “let Robert Mueller do his job,” and even recent White House transplant Melania Trump has reportedly told her husband that keeping Mueller will speed the resolution of the Russia scandal.

Whether the capricious president’s inner circle can keep him in check is another question. Trump is said to be proud of yesterday’s not-so-nimble refusal to pledge support to Mueller, seeing it as an artfully tactical ploy aimed at steering the investigation toward his desired outcome of total, public exoneration. Indeed, his expectation that threatening to oust Mueller might compel him to soft-pedal the F.B.I. probe betrays a remarkable naivete of how Washington, and longtime civil servants like Mueller, operate. And as his firing of Comey showed, Trump is liable to make impulsive decisions when his pride is on the line.

Trump’s failure to endorse Mueller amounts to a crude display of his possible powers. If he snaps, and his intentions take another, tumultuous turn, there are few guardrails preventing him from removing the special counsel—a move that would almost certainly trigger a constitutional crisis. As the White House aides scrambling to calm the president surely understand, even Trump could not survive such a seismic and egocentric abuse of power. Whether the president understands those limitations, and is constrained by them, remains to be seen.