This still left some implausible holes. Giuliani claimed that Trump had paid Cohen as part of a normal retainer agreement, yet Cohen said he had to take funds out of a home-equity line of credit to pay Daniels. How many lawyers take out loans while waiting for their normal pay to clear? There was a deeper problem, too: Giuliani’s aim had clearly been to show that Trump hadn’t violated campaign-finance law with the payment, though as Rick Hasen explained in Slate, it’s not clear his explanation actually did that.

But Giuliani destroyed any impression that he had a cleverly elegant solution the following morning on Fox and Friends. Giuliani said first that the payment had nothing to do with the campaign, an essential part of his argument that no campaign-finance laws could have been broken.

“This was for personal reasons,” Giuliani said. “It wasn’t for the campaign. It was to save their marr—not their marriage so much, but their reputation.”

But moments later, he blew his own argument apart, acknowledging the concern that the Daniels story could have emerged and hurt Trump in the home stretch of the campaign.

“Imagine if that came out on October 15, 2016, in the middle of the last debate with Hillary Clinton,” he said.

Had Giuliani gone rogue? On a properly functioning defense team, perhaps, but the president has nothing of the sort. Giuliani told the Post that he had both discussed his plans to disclose the reimbursement with Trump, and that he had spoken with Trump after his Hannity interview, and that Trump was “very pleased.” Moreover, Trump tweeted a statement (written in legal language, with formal titles, that seemed written by someone other than Trump, though still including a typo) that confirmed what Giuliani had said.

Then Friday morning, Trump reversed course. “Rudy is a great guy but he just started, but he just started a day ago. He’s learning the subject matter and he’s going to be issuing a statement too,” the president said as he prepared to leave for a trip to the NRA convention in Dallas. “He started yesterday, he’ll get his facts straight.”

In other words, Trump was saying the account he had both discussed with Giuliani ahead of time and endorsed in his tweets Thursday was not true. Trump’s claim that Giuliani just had his first day was also not true. The White House announced his addition on April 19, and Giuliani has described conversations with Trump about the case stretching back two weeks.

Later on Friday, Giuliani issued the promised statement. He said that “there was no campaign violation” because “the payment was made to resolve a personal and false allegation in order to protect the President’s family” that “would have been done in any event, whether he was a candidate or not.” Giuliani also said that his claims about when Trump learned about the payment were his own understanding, not the president’s.