Quick: A whistle-blower has filed an “urgent” complaint regarding your attempt to get Ukraine to dig up dirt on your political rival. A rough readout of your call with Ukraine’s president shows you did exactly that, essentially tying a request for a “favor” to hundreds of millions of dollars in military and intelligence aid that was “mysteriously” held up at the time. An official impeachment inquiry has been launched into your conduct, and things do not look good. Do you (a) lie low, keep to yourself, and try to stay out of trouble; (b) privately fume to allies that you’ve done nothing wrong while putting out a statement saying something like, “We’re confident that when the full details are revealed, my name will be cleared”; or (c) publicly, and in full view of rolling cameras...do the very thing you’ve just been accused of? If you’re Donald Trump, that’s not even a question!

Speaking at a press conference at the United Nations with Ukraine president Volodymyr Zelensky, Trump was asked, “Would you like President Zelensky to do more on Joe Biden and the investigation?” To which the president, who thinks he’s a lot smarter than he actually is, responded:

“No, I want him to do whatever he can. This was not his fault. He was not there. He’s just been here recently. But whatever he can do in terms of corruption, because the corruption is massive. Now, when Biden’s son walks away with millions of dollars from Ukraine and he knows nothing, and they’re paying him millions of dollars, that’s corruption. When Biden’s son walks out of China with $1.5 billion in a fund and the biggest funds in the world can’t get money out of China. And he’s there for one quick meeting and then he flies in on Air Force Two. I think that’s a horrible thing. I think that’s a horrible thing, but I’m going far beyond that. I know the president, and I’ve read a lot about Ukraine, I’ve read about a lot of countries. He wants to stop corruption.”

As in the case of the readout, Trump thinks that because he’s not literally saying, “If you ever want to see the money, you’ll bring me the Biden dirt,” he’s in the clear, like a guy who was taught to speak in code by a mafia lawyer worried about the feds and wiretaps and cooperating witnesses. Except in this case, he’s not even speaking in code! He says he wants Zelensky to do “whatever he can do in terms of corruption,” and in the very next breath goes on at length about how Biden’s son has done something corrupt. (Those allegations, incidentally, are entirely baseless.)

For his part, Zelensky looked like a hostage during the entire ordeal, an expression he also sported when Trump said that he and Vladimir Putin should put their troubles behind them, ignoring the fact that the two countries are in a little bit of a tiff at the moment because Russia invaded Ukraine and annexed Crimea, and more than 10,000 people have been killed since war broke out in eastern Ukraine in April 2014:

Also on Wednesday, Trump claimed, like the deeply unwell person that he is, that this impeachment stuff was “all planned” in advance by Democrats because they knew he was going to be so successful at the U.N., and they just couldn’t let him have that.