America has a grand tradition of the brazenly dumb criminal: the kind who is so desperately needy that he brags about his guilt.

Back in the earliest days of the new media known as newspapers, a certain Chicago mob boss rose to fame by calling a press conference to proclaim everyone else’s guilt, if not exactly his innocence.

Al Capone claimed he played no role in the gunning down of a young state’s attorney called Bill McSwiggin. In fact he said he could have killed him any time but preferred to keep him alive. “I paid McSwiggin,” Capone said. “I paid him plenty and I got what I was paying for.”

Sure enough, Capone was cleared of the murder and became the darling of an insatiable press pack. If you don’t act guilty, will anyone really think you’re guilty? Especially if everyone else is guilty too.

Almost a century later, Donald Trump has cornered the Scarface strategy. If he didn’t think neo-Nazis were very fine people, Trump could win a Maccabiah medal for chutzpah.

In some corner of his orange-tipped cranium there are surely a handful of brain cells that are fully aware that his entire family has engaged with foreign dictators and their oligarchs for personal profit.

But the rest of Trump’s brain is an irony-free zone entirely empty of self-awareness. So he and much of his Cabinet fanned out across the gullible media to proclaim everyone else’s guilt in a Ukraine scandal that would normally lead to certain impeachment.

To be clear, the only scandal involving Ukraine is that Trump openly admits that he repeatedly pressed a foreign leader for dirt on his political opponents ahead of a presidential election. For the second election in a row. Only this time, he could use the promise of military and foreign aid to grease his request.

It’s worth quoting Trump’s bizarre explanation of this gambit in full, describing his call to the newly-elected president of Ukraine as follows: “The conversation I had was largely congratulatory,” he told reporters on Sunday. “It was largely corruption. All of the corruption taking place. It was largely the fact that we don’t want our people, like Vice President Biden and his son, creating to the corruption already in the Ukraine.”

Now Donald Trump is something of an expert in corruption, if not creating to the corruption. It takes a great deal of creativity to get your own vice-president to stay at your Irish hotel when it’s 180 miles away from his meetings in Dublin. You can’t even conceive of the creativity needed to explain away the US Air Force staying at a luxury golf resort in Scotland that just happens to be another Trump property.

Trump’s excuse was that he knew nothing about the military staying at his hotel, and had nothing to do with Mike Pence’s long commute from Doonbeg to Dublin. So what if Pence’s chief of staff said Trump had made a suggestion about the stay? He just had great taste – like the military that loves Turnberry so much.

Trump apparently knows nothing about his own officials lining his own pockets. But he does know a thing or two about Ukraine.

It was at his own convention in 2016 when his own campaign chairman changed his own party platform to weaken US support for Ukraine against Russia’s annexation of Crimea and its interference in Ukraine’s politics.

“Ukraine has got a lot of problems,” Trump explained to reporters. “The new president is saying that he’s going to be able to rid the country of corruption. And I said that would be a great thing. We had a great conversation. We backed – I backed Ukraine from the beginning.”

Amnesia is a terrible problem for today’s world leaders. Especially the morally dubious ones who are either too brazen or too lazy to think of a decent excuse.

Somehow Trump has forgotten about how bad a liar his lawyer is, or why Ukraine is even enmeshed in the multiple scandals that would lead to the impeachment of any other president.

Would Trump let Rudy Giuliani testify to Congress about his own efforts?

“Oh I would have no problem with it,” he told reporters on Sunday. “Rudy is a very straight shooter. And Rudy wants to see the same thing as a lot of other people with respect to your Ukraine. Ukraine has had a tremendous corruption problem. Somehow they were involved in a lot of different things that took place in our country, and hopefully it can be straightened out.”

Hopefully we can straighten this out for you, Mr President. Rudy shoots so straight that he can break land speed records for lying on national television. Did he ask Ukraine’s government to investigate Joe Biden? “No, actually I didn’t,” he told CNN, before admitting 30 seconds later, “of course I did.”

Somehow Ukraine was involved in a lot of things in American politics, Mr President. Most of them involving Paul Manafort, your old campaign chairman, now serving time in jail for tax evasion on all the cash he made from Ukraine’s former president. The one supported by Vladimir Putin, whom you asked for help to hack into the emails of your opponents in the last election during a press conference.

“It was a perfect call. A perfect call,” Trump said on Sunday. “What wasn’t perfect is the horrible thing that Joe Biden said. And now he made it a lie when he said he never spoke to his son. I mean, give me a break. He’s already said he spoke to his son. And now he said, yesterday, very firmly. Who wouldn’t speak to your son? Of course you spoke to your son. So he made the mistake of saying he never spoke to his son. He spoke to his son.”

The son thing is troubling, Mr President. Troubling because you sound unhinged.

“But more importantly,” Trump continued, “what he said about the billions of dollars that he wouldn’t give them unless they fired the prosecutor. And then he bragged about how they fired the prosecutor and they got the money.”

Oh yes. The money thing. It’s a beauty. Biden is smeared by the most braggadociously corrupt president for pushing Ukraine to have a prosecutor who will fight corruption.

It may be no surprise that Trump is circling the drain while clinging on to his own dizzy conspiracies. His election prospects are miserable and he desperately needs another looney-tuned cartoon like the Clinton email saga.

But it’s still surprising to see his secretary of state and Treasury secretary peddling the same smear as if it was just another Sunday talk show subject.

Is there anyone left with any self-respect in the Republican party? Step forward Mitt Romney, the former Republican nominee and now Utah senator. No really, step forward.

“If the President asked or pressured Ukraine’s president to investigate his political rival, either directly or through his personal attorney, it would be troubling in the extreme. Critical for the facts to come out,” Romney tweeted.

Damn the torpedoes. The senator is extremely troubled, if not rather exercised, by the possibility of something that Trump and Giuliani have already admitted on camera.

If you’re wondering what the next 14 months of the presidential election looks like, you are already looking at it. The poor citizens of Ukraine have been looking at it for the last five years, ever since Russian troops marched in and unleashed their disinformation on an unsuspecting world.

Like Vladimir Putin, Al Capone knew that don’t have to be smart to get away with murder. You just have to confuse everyone about what guilt looks like.