None of these men came close to Mr. Trump in his capacity to provoke. A product of the New York tabloid world, Mr. Trump has an unerring instinct for saying things that will produce gasps. An aide may try to steer him away from perilous topics or suggest that something be said off the record, but he usually plows forward anyway. Indeed, while other presidents are routinely joined by multiple advisers and an official stenographer for such interviews, just one aide was present at ours.

This is hardly heedless. Mr. Trump toggled from on the record to off the record with remarkable fluidity. Clearly he was conscious that some things would be problematic if quoted, so it’s fair to conclude that the provocative things he said on the record were intentionally so. When we asked more than once whether he might fire the special counsel, he very consciously avoided a direct answer. (We pressed him repeatedly to stay on the record, and the vast majority of the time he did.)

Unlike with other presidents, though, there was no need to knock him off the script. He happily answered every question we asked, even if it would ultimately overshadow the designated messages of the day — in this case health care and made-in-America economics.

When it came to the Russia matter, he easily could have dismissed questions by saying — as have other presidents — that he could not comment on a continuing investigation. Instead, he teed off, presumably because he wanted to.

With Mr. Trump, the conversation is more rat-a-tat. He doesn’t mind if you interject. But he tends to veer wildly from thought to thought, moving on before you’ve fully explored what he just said.

His precision can be suspect — among other things, he mixed up details of a letter written by James B. Comey, the former F.B.I. director; misconstrued the point of a story in The New York Times that annoyed him; and claimed that some people get health insurance for $12 a year. But the conversation moves so quickly from one newsworthy topic to another that it is hard to challenge each assertion.