A few short but very long days in the life of the Trump presidency: On Wednesday night, Rudy Giuliani, a newly minted member of the president’s legal team, acknowledged on national television that Mr. Trump had been aware of his personal lawyer Michael Cohen’s $130,000 payment to an adult film actress on Mr. Trump’s behalf — contradicting the president’s previous claims. Mr. Trump promptly attempted damage control by tweet to ward off speculation that the payment to Stephanie Clifford, known professionally as Stormy Daniels, might have constituted a violation of campaign finance law. Though the president’s tweets seemed to confirm Mr. Giuliani’s account of events, on Friday Mr. Trump hinted that his lawyer needed to “get his facts straight.”

Mr. Giuliani’s comments came only a few hours after news broke out that another of Mr. Trump’s attorneys would retire from the legal team handling the Russia investigation — the second to depart in six weeks. The previous day, the president’s personal doctor accused Mr. Trump’s former bodyguard and others of “raiding” his office and removing Mr. Trump’s medical records, while Sarah Huckabee Sanders, the White House press secretary, deflected questions about a New York Times story listing in detail a range of subjects about which Robert Mueller, the special counsel, is seeking to interview the president. Through it all, Mr. Trump fumed on Twitter over the “Russian witch hunt.”

So goes a normal week in 2018. The push alerts ping. The tweets stack up. Arguments over constitutional law and attorney-client privilege fill the airwaves. The noise roars so loudly and from so many different sources that however much we strain to listen, it’s next to impossible to make sense out of it.