During his testimony to the House Oversight and Reform Committee, on Wednesday, Michael Cohen raised his bushy eyebrows and nodded emphatically as he read out the damning particulars of yet another alleged lie that Donald Trump has told the American people. The President, Cohen said in his opening statement, had admitted to him that his decades-old story about why he did not serve in the Vietnam War was false, revealing that he had never had bone-spur surgery, as he claimed in order to receive a medical deferment. The disclosure from Trump came during the 2016 campaign, when Cohen’s job was to shut down the bad press coverage of Trump’s dubious explanation for why he had not served in Vietnam. “You think I’m stupid?” Cohen recalled Trump telling him. “I wasn’t going to Vietnam.”

Amid Cohen’s many sensational claims of criminal wrongdoing by the President, it was perhaps understandable that this one Trump lie of many did not dominate the headlines. In seven hours of testimony, Trump’s former personal lawyer and fixer testified that the President had paid hush money to cover up an affair with a porn star and produced signed checks to prove it; that he had known in advance about the WikiLeaks dump of hacked Democratic e-mails during the 2016 campaign; that he had engaged in a wide array of questionable and possibly illegal business practices; and that he had lied to the public about doing business in Russia throughout his race for the Presidency. With so much alleged wrongdoing to contemplate, Cohen’s claim that Trump was both a Vietnam draft dodger and an inveterate liar about it was almost a throwaway.

Yet Cohen disclosed this on a day when Trump was actually in Vietnam, having travelled there to broker a breakthrough deal on nuclear disarmament with the North Korean leader, Kim Jong Un. “I find it ironic,” Cohen said in his testimony, addressing the former boss he once promised to take a bullet for, “that you are in Vietnam right now.” Ironic is one word for it; incredible is another. Earlier that morning, Trump had offered a rich example of his you-can’t-make-this-up Presidency. Sitting in his Hanoi hotel room before going to one of the most important negotiating sessions of his Presidency, Trump took the time to preëmpt Cohen’s Vietnam-draft-dodger allegation with an attack of his own, Twitter-taunting the Connecticut Democratic senator Richard Blumenthal (“Da Nang Dick,” in Trumpspeak) as a Vietnam “total fraud,” because he has been accused of misrepresenting his service record. “I have now spent more time in Vietnam” than Blumenthal, Trump tweeted. Some days, Trump is so brazen it is breathtaking. Wednesday was one of those days.

By Thursday morning, however, it was clear that no amount of Trump bluster or deflection could obscure the twin disasters of the last twenty-four hours. Trump had finally gone to Vietnam, and lost the battle, if not the war. Back in Washington, the Cohen testimony had been a humiliation, the most public turning on a President by his lawyer since the White House counsel John Dean warned Richard Nixon, in 1973, that Watergate was a “cancer on the Presidency.” One striking aspect of Cohen’s testimony was that Republican members of the House Oversight and Reform Committee chose not to argue with the substance of the allegations against Trump, in effect refusing to mount a defense of the President. Instead, they concentrated their questioning on matters designed to undercut the already suspect credibility of Cohen, who will soon go to prison for, among other things, lying to Congress. In Hanoi, meanwhile, the deal that Trump had hoped to cut with Kim failed to materialize—even the shameless flattery that Trump had lavished on the young dictator was insufficient to sway Kim from his demands for immediate sanctions relief while maintaining North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Trump had no choice but to leave Hanoi empty-handed.

President Trump was unable to sway Kim Jong Un from his demands for immediate sanctions relief while maintaining North Korea’s nuclear arsenal. Photograph by Evan Vucci / AP

The bills of the last two years are coming due for Trump, and if there’s one thing we know about him by now it is that he does not like to pay his bills. Trump was a casino owner for years in Atlantic City, until his operations there went bust; he knows what happens when you make a bad bet. “Sometimes you have to walk,” Trump said, visibly unhappy about it, as he announced the collapse of the talks on Thursday. If his own history is a guide, Trump will call in the bankruptcy lawyers (or, in this case, the State Department) to clean up the mess while he pretends the setback never happened.

On North Korea, it had long been clear that Trump placed his team in a bind with few ways out. He declared victory in his Singapore summit, last year, without having, in fact, achieved the deal he touted, forcing his negotiators to scramble afterward to secure concessions he had already claimed. It wasn’t to be. Still, the sense of relief was palpable and largely bipartisan when Washington woke up to the news of the failed Hanoi summit on Thursday morning. “No deal is better than a bad deal,” Senator Marco Rubio, the Florida Republican and former Presidential-primary candidate who is now an on-again, off-again foreign-policy adviser to Trump, tweeted. Democrats might have felt like gloating, but, given that Trump was actively contemplating giving Kim the Korean War peace declaration he has long wanted and was reportedly considering a reduced U.S. military presence for South Korea, this seemed preferable. Even House Speaker Nancy Pelosi told reporters that Trump was right to have left without a deal. “I guess it took two meetings for him to realize that Kim Jong Un is not on the level,” she said.

Trump’s comments before he left Hanoi, however, suggested the President did not by any means accept Pelosi’s analysis. Trump is still Trump; not only did the President not back down from his lavish embrace of a leader so tyrannical that U.S. intelligence officials believe he ordered the murders of his uncle and half-brother, Trump flaunted it. “We like each other,” Trump insisted. “I trust him, and I take him at his word,” citing their relationship as if it were a major diplomatic accomplishment in its own right.

It was a weak performance from a President who, after the events of the last day, had never seemed weaker. Trump has touted himself a dealmaker, but this week was a reminder that he has a better record of blowing up deals than making them. He has defied laws of political gravity for so long that he thought he was immune to them. He has lied so flagrantly and for so many years without consequence that he thought he could always do so. Rarely has a President been so publicly humiliated, in different settings by such different actors, in such a short span of time. You’d never know it to listen to Trump, though; he is not one to accept or even acknowledge the political predicament his own misjudgment has landed him in.

The stubborn, reality-defying character of Donald Trump was very much the theme of Cohen’s testimony on Capitol Hill this week, and I suspect that is what will be remembered about the epic hearing years from now. Cohen’s appearance was a daylong advanced seminar in the study of Trump by one of its most experienced practitioners, and the portrait of the President that emerged was both compelling and devastating. Of course, America has had Presidents of bad character before, but never one whose close confidant was willing to publicly accuse him, under oath in a congressional hearing, of being a “racist,” a “con man,” and a “cheat.”