But it was in his post-election White House news conference in the East Room that Trump really seemed to jump the shark. He congratulated victorious Republican candidates, then mockingly singled out by name losing ones who had shrunk from accepting his help. He praised Nancy Pelosi as deserving a return to the speakership, saying, “There are many things we can get along on,” including infrastructure and the environment, but warned that if Democrats began flooding him with subpoenas, all bets would be off in a “warlike posture,” and he would blame them for gridlock, adding, “I know more than they know.”

He once again insisted that he would refuse to release his tax returns as long as he is under “a very continuous audit.” “They’re extremely complex,” he said. “People wouldn’t understand them.” Asked how he saw himself as “a moral leader,” the president modestly averred, “I think I am a great moral leader and I love our country.”

Read: Forcing out Sessions is an attack on accountability

At one point, he sharply cut off one black journalist who tried to ask about voter suppression in the midterms (“Sit down, please. Sit down. I didn’t call you. I didn’t call you.”), and he took great offense when another asked if his campaign rhetoric and embrace of nationalism had encouraged white supremacists, snapping, “That’s a racist question!” When foreign journalists posed questions in accented English, he scrunched up his face and complained that he could not understand them.

Still, all that was pale prologue compared with his sudden afternoon ouster of Attorney General Jeff Sessions, the latest move in his slow-motion Saturday Night Massacre of nettlesome subordinates that began with his firing of FBI Director James Comey 18 months ago. Indeed, not since Richard Nixon’s infamous firing of Watergate Special Prosecutor Archibald Cox on a Saturday evening in October 1973 has a president so electrified the capital (or the country) by seeming to dance so near to the edge of autocratic behavior.

Trump had the unquestioned power to demand Sessions’s resignation, of course, and in one way or another had been threatening to do so ever since Sessions recused himself from the Russia investigation early in Trump’s administration. “He took the job and then he said, ‘I’m going to recuse myself.’ I said, ‘What kind of a man is this?’” Trump asked in an interview with Fox News earlier this year. Not the kind of man Trump wanted on his team, to say the least.

But the dramatic firing seemed, at a minimum, to contradict—or at least cast doubt on—Trump’s own words at his news conference, when he said, “I could fire everybody right now,” but added, “Politically, I do not like stopping it.” He once again attacked the investigation as marred by conflicts of interest and insisted, “But you know what I do? I let it go on. They are wasting a lot of money. I let it go on because I do not want to do that.”