Trump, realizing the threat that the revelation poses, turned to Twitter … and lied. He wrote: “It now seems the General Flynn was under investigation long before was common knowledge. It would have been impossible for me to know this but, if that was the case, and with me being one of two people who would become president, why was I not told so that I could make a change?”

As CNN put it: “Trump’s tweet is misleading and lacks context. For starters, the Justice Department and F.B.I. conduct all their investigations in secret, including the one into Flynn. Trump also fails to mention that he was repeatedly warned about Flynn, though not by the Justice Department, but he ignored that political advice and gave him a top job in the administration.”

Trump knows his statement is off, but he also knows that the truth has the capacity to harm when one operates in an arena beyond it. That tweet, unlike lying about his wall of hate already being under construction, is born of fear. I can just imagine the beads of sweat forming on the philtrum above his upper lip as his thumbs tap this falsehood on this phone. He grimaces; I smile.

We occasionally get a glorious glimpse of this fear fibbing. It’s like the time he held the bracing news conference in Trump Tower to defend his both-sides-ism on Charlottesville. It’s like the time he told the deer-in-the-headlights lie on Air Force One about not knowing about hush money payments to women alleging to have had sexual encounters with him (while he was married, by the way). It is in the police-interrogation-room-like correction that he didn’t mean to side with Russia — and deny our intelligence community — while standing next to Vladimir Putin in Helsinki.

In all those moments, he simply reeks of dread and trepidation. In those moments, we are reminded that Trump knows what other thinking people know: In a world not blinded and numbed by racial tribalism, demographic fears and cultural panic, these issues that barely nick him would cut him smooth and deep.

It is in those moments that we are reminded of what normal felt like, when an apology or explanation was compelled, and politicians confronted their foibles with some degree of contrition.

Trump knows nothing of contrition, but take his moments of desperation as proof that the world has not completely gone mad, that sin still has the ability to convict.

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