One of the more inevitable bits of fallout from Robert Mueller's testimony was that Donald Trump would declare victory while betraying his real fear that he may still face repercussions for his behavior. After all, the ex-special counsel confirmed in his testimony that:

1) Russia attacked the 2016 election to help Trump, because they believed a Trump presidency would benefit Russia.

2) The Trump campaign was aware of and welcomed that attack, and did not at any point report it to law enforcement. Campaign officials had at least 140 contacts with Russian nationals and also did not report that. In fact, he and his people lied relentlessly about it to cover it up.

3) Trump repeatedly obstructed the subsequent investigation into a hostile foreign power's attack on American democracy and whether his associates played a role.

4) The president could not be charged with a crime while in office—because of a Justice Department guideline that is the only reasonable explanation for why he wasn't indicted for obstruction of justice—but could still be charged after he leaves.

Mueller did not set the world on fire, but the facts are clear. Alex Wong Getty Images

While savvy Beltway types have chosen to focus on what was indeed a poor theatrical showing from a career bureaucrat, these are the facts. And while anonymous White House officials spent every break in the hearings telling reporters that Trump was loving the proceedings, our fearless leader held a patented HeliPresser with a gaggle of reporters afterwards which did not exactly reinforce the notion that he is at ease.

(Before we begin, it's worth remarking on the White House press corp's continued participation in these obvious charades. The president is not holding a press conference in front of a helicopter with spinning rotors that cause an infernal din because he wants to make himself available and accountable to the public. He is doing it so viewers can't hear reporters' questions, reporters can't ask follow-ups when he lies blatantly, and all that viewers really get is his unfiltered bullshit shouted at them while he bludgeons faceless journalists. It's a way to bypass the free press as a mechanism of democratic accountability—the same way he uses Twitter—while maintaining a facade of accountability.)

OK, here we go.

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ME: “Mueller said you could be criminally charged after leaving office?”

TRUMP: Denies Mueller said this and then when I challenge him on facts, calls me “the worst.” #MuellerDay #MuellerHearing pic.twitter.com/1v66aApQKJ — Paula Reid (@PaulaReidCBS) July 24, 2019

Here's the President of the United States, stabbing his finger towards a reporter as he yells, "You're Fake News," insisting that Robert Mueller made a "correction" to the statement that the president could be charged with a crime after he leaves office. Mueller did not correct this. He corrected his definitive statement that the only reason Trump was not indicted was the Justice Department regulation against indicting a sitting president.

(Again, this is almost certainly the reason, though: Mueller found insufficient evidence to charge Trump with conspiracy, and said so in the report. He did not say there was insufficient evidence of obstruction, though, and, in fact, laid out voluminous evidence of it. At the hearing, he confirmed various incidents met all three legal criteria to constitute obstruction. Trump wasn't charged because he's the president. Any other American would have been indicted long ago.)

Anyway, the reporter was exactly right. There's some debate as to whether Mueller was referring to this case specifically or to sitting presidents in general, but he did not retract the statement. Forget all that, though—it's the president's yelling time! It's incredible that we have accepted this state of affairs, where the world's most powerful man stomps around a gaggle of reporters, yelling at them that they're Fake, repeating his (usually false) claims in escalating tantrumized tones like a 9-year-old. There was another dose of it when Wikileaks came up.

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Trump gets mad when a reporter asks him if he's concerned about getting indicted after he leaves office, says "WikiLeaks is a hoax just like everything else" and calls the reporter "fake news" pic.twitter.com/fwAqhOZv1Z — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 24, 2019

Wikileaks, an organization Trump praised countless times and whose website he frequently directed people towards during the 2016 election, is now a "hoax"? Is he saying it doesn't exist, or is he struggling to articulate, with his extremely limited vocabulary and nightmarish syntax, that it was not involved in the Russian interference? The latter is also untrue, but would have at least a modicum of the sophistication we ought to demand from authoritarian leaders who lie to our faces. And then, of course, he screamed at another reporter that they were also Fake News. This is considered a normal tactic for the President of the United States to employ.

But there was still time for another bit of speechifying, this time featuring a bold call to arms: "If you listen to the Internet..."

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TRUMP: "If you listen to the internet, this was one of the worst performances in the history of our country ... it was a fake set of facts that the Democrats used, and others, to try and do really an illegal overthrow, but we're going find out about that." pic.twitter.com/tebNoqdjfB — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 24, 2019

This is something your grandpa would say at dinner and you'd share a smirk with somebody else at the table and move on. Except he's the president. "It was a fake set of facts that the Democrats used, and others, to try and do really an illegal overthrow," he barked. This was another clumsy attempt to allege there was an attempted coup against him, but we no longer even expect the president to speak English at an eighth-grade level. The Deep State, you see, tried to do an overthrow. It's gotten to the point where he's repeated the same lies and distortions and intergalactic delusions blasted from the Fox News infotainment vortex so often that we can use heuristics to decipher what he's saying, even if his language is not, in itself, particularly comprehensible.

This is all another reminder that House Democrats really should not need the numerous instances of obstruction of justice outlined in the Mueller Report—or, for that matter, the financial records Nancy Pelosi cited in a press conference yesterday evening—to begin impeachment proceedings. It feels like reasonable enough criteria that the president is fucking nuts. It's easy to forget that a few days ago, he caused an international incident when he off-handedly floated perpetrating a genocide in Afghanistan. He's also been accused by numerous women of sexual assault and misconduct. He's also a blatant racist who has embraced political violence. He's also attacking the institutions of democracy, like the separation of powers and an independent system of justice and the free press, which can provide a check on his power. And yeah, he obstructed justice. Might be time to do something.

Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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