Apparently unable to convince Donald Trump that he is his own worst legal nightmare, Rudy Giuliani made a grudging reversal on Wednesday, telling The Washington Post that he sees little choice but to let the president to sit down with Robert Mueller in “the next couple weeks.”

When Giuliani joined Trump’s legal team in April, he picked up the mantle left by his predecessor John Dowd and got to work trying to convince Trump that an interview with the special counsel would almost certainly backfire. For weeks, Giuliani railed against the idea, in private and in public, declaring that the meeting would almost certainly be a “perjury trap.” Left unsaid, but obvious to anyone with a passing familiarity with the president, is the fact that Trump is a serial fabulist with virtually zero impulse control. “Every lawyer in America thinks he would be a fool to testify,” Giuliani lamented to George Stephanopoulos earlier this month. “I have a client who wants to testify.”

While multiple sources in the Washington legal community reject the characterization that Mueller is setting a “perjury trap,” every attorney I’ve spoken to has agreed that a Trump-Mueller showdown would be a mistake given Trump’s penchant for exaggeration, half-truths, and outright falsehoods. “Ordinarily, when you’re representing a high-ranking government official, you’re not worried about your client being forthcoming because that goes with the nature of government service,” Neal Katyal, a former acting solicitor general under President Barack Obama, told me. “But here, I think the lawyers are wise to worry, just given Donald Trump’s track record of him confabulating in any number of ways.”

As recently as Tuesday, Giuliani was reluctant to have Trump go toe-to-toe with the former F.B.I. director. “If they said you have to do it now, the answer would have to be no,” Giuliani told The Wall Street Journal. But over the past 24 hours, Giuliani appears to have reached the conclusion that an interview is inevitable. “I guess I’d rather do the interview. It gets it over with. It makes my client happy,” the former New York mayor told the Post. “The safe course you hear every lawyer say is don’t do the interview, and that’s easy to say in the abstract. That’s much harder when you have a client who is the president of the United States and wants to be interviewed.”

Giuliani’s about-face throws into stark relief the difficulties in representing Trump, who has been known to ignore advice from his lawyers—a tendency that reportedly led him to clash with Dowd earlier this year and prompted multiple prominent attorneys to turn down the opportunity to represent the president. When I asked one white-shoe defense attorney whether Trump posed unique challenges as a client, they exploded. “You’re kidding right?” said the attorney, who did not wish to be named. “Representing this guy would be almost an impossibility. I mean, I don’t know who would want to do that.”