O’Brien doubted that Trump could avoid perjuring himself, even under the best circumstances, given his well-documented penchant for false statements and exaggeration. “He has never been subjected to this kind of scrutiny in his entire business and political life. He’s certainly never been subjected to someone who has all of the firepower that Bob Mueller is bringing to bear on this,” he continued. “They couldn’t be more opposites as people. Mueller’s content to stay out of the headlines, and he’s content to quietly, methodically, and diligently build a case. He’s a devotee of the fact pattern. Trump—he’s not patient, he’s not methodical, and he ignores facts.”

“The only real question here is: does he decide ‘I can’t politically handle refusing to talk?’”

The greatest danger for Trump is what Donald Rumsfeld famously called the “unknown unknowns.” While the Russia story has been defined by leaks—particularly flowing from the various congressional investigations—Mueller’s team has been airtight. “The piece that’s always missing in every conversation about Mueller, and this is consistently the case, is that we assume we know what he wants to ask, and we actually don’t,” Bauer said. “That’s going to drive a significant amount of the discussion about what accommodations are appropriate, what topics are going to be available, and how long it’s going to run. It depends on how much ground the special counsel has to cover legitimately. That’s going to be determined by information the special counsel has that we might have only the dimmest sense of, and some parts of which we don’t know anything about at all.”

The information asymmetry means that Trump’s legal team has to prepare him to field any number of questions about various events over the past several years—a unique challenge for a president who often struggles to tell the same story twice. “I think it’d be very dangerous for him to go in for an interview. In our situation, President Clinton pretty much knew what we knew by the time he went in for his grand-jury questioning,” said Wisenberg, referring to the Starr investigation. “Here, I don’t care how much his lawyers are trying to talk to lawyers in the same camp—and I’m sure they’re doing it—they just don’t know everything that Mueller knows.”

Of course, Trump always has the nuclear option. The strongest hand the president’s team has to play is to refuse to speak with Mueller at all. If Mueller subpoenas the president to testify before a grand jury—as Starr did to Clinton—Trump’s team could fight the order in court. Given the precedent set in United States v. Nixon, however, the president would almost certainly lose. That would leave Trump with the option to invoke the Fifth Amendment and refuse to testify—a legally sound, but potentially explosive, final move. Typically, pleading the Fifth would be a smart move for a client in Trump’s circumstance, Wisenberg said. But Trump is hardly the typical client. “The only real question here is: does he decide ‘I can’t politically handle refusing to talk?’”

With the president’s allies on Fox News already eroding faith in the Department of Justice to run an unbiased investigation, stonewalling Mueller may, in fact, be the smarter move. “In my own view, in President Trump’s case, people have seemed to have made up their minds about him,” Bennett mused. “His supporters would say, ‘Well, why should he? Everybody knows that the special counsel is out to get him.’ Those who are opposed to Mr. Trump will say, ‘See, he’s hiding something.’” Until control of one or both houses of Congress changes hands, the needle in Washington is unmoved.

Some in Trumpworld have questioned why Mueller needs to speak with Trump at all, given the White House’s cooperation with the probe and the dozens of interviews the special prosecutor has already conducted with Trump associates. Mueller “has all of the notes and memos of the thoughts and actions of this president on all subjects he requested in real time without reservation or qualification, including testimony from his most intimate staff and eight lawyers from the White House Counsel’s office. Any question for the president is answered in these materials and testimony,” a member of the Trump legal team told the Journal.