House Republicans needed a trial lawyer—or even a moderately bright junior-high mock-trial participant—to tell them how to do anything. Cross-examination is hard. It’s not just barking at the witness. It takes meticulous planning and patience. Republicans could have marshaled Cohen’s many sins of the past to undermine his statements today. Instead, they returned repeatedly to lies and misdeeds he’s already admitted, wallowed in silly trivialities such as the “Women for Cohen” Twitter account, and yelled. The effect was to make an unsympathetic man modestly more sympathetic. Republicans committed the classic cross-examination blunder: They gave the witness the opportunity to further explain his harmful direct testimony. They provided Cohen with one slow pitch up the middle after another, letting him repeat the cooperating witness’s go-to explanation like a mantra: I did these bad things so often and so long because that’s what it took to work for your guy. I have seldom seen a cross-examination go worse.

If the hearing’s participants needed trial lawyers, its absent subject needs them even more. Whether the danger is looming impeachment hearings or the special counsel’s investigation, the president of the United States is in the soup.

Read: 9 striking moments from Michael Cohen’s testimony

Cohen put Trump squarely at the middle of the harebrained scheme to hide hush-money payments to Stormy Daniels. He corroborated that tale with checks from Trump and the Trump Organization. The odd and haphazard way Trump reimbursed Cohen helps make the case that Trump knew the entire ruse breached campaign-finance laws—if not clearly enough for a federal jury, at least enough for a House committee on impeachment. Cohen offered enough specific examples of Trump Organization financial skulduggery to launch a thousand subpoenas. He confirmed that Trump’s lawyers knew about, and even edited, Cohen’s prior, false statements to Congress, suggesting a possible conspiracy to obstruct justice and lie to Congress. He also claimed that Trump talked to Roger Stone about WikiLeaks in advance of the release of hacked Democratic National Committee emails. That’s not itself illegal or collusion—receiving dirt, even eagerly, is not against the law—but it probably contradicts the statements Trump has given under oath to the special counsel, leading to more danger for the president. Finally, Cohen confirmed that the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York is still investigating Trump for unspecified crimes. Nothing good has come out of the Southern District for this administration.

Team Trump should be worried. Republicans did not successfully destroy Cohen’s credibility. Cohen, while characteristically squirrelly on some subjects, did not exude his customary arrogance. In fact, he probably gained credibility by limiting his accusations—he passed up numerous opportunities to make expansive claims about collusion or salacious ones about sex tapes, focusing instead on relatively narrow allegations. Democrats didn’t help him, but they signaled that they were willing to conduct further investigations based on his word.