The day he drove a fourth company into bankruptcy; the moment his longtime doctor told The New York Times he takes Propecia, a drug used to treat male-pattern baldness; the exact second he realized he would have to actually serve as president. Arguably, these have been some of the worst moments of Donald Trump’s life—that is, until this past weekend, when, over a period of 48 hours, the Times reported that law enforcement had opened an investigation into the possibility that the president of the United States was a Russian asset, The Washington Post reported that Trump has “gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin,” his economy-dinging shutdown entered its 23rd day, and no one—not one person!—gave him credit for sticking around the White House when he could’ve been off playing golf at Mar-a-Lago, a situation that left him even more steamed and unglued than usual.

But let’s rewind. On Friday night, the paper of record published an absolutely bombshell report saying that in the days after Trump fired F.B.I. director James Comey, law-enforcement officials “became so concerned by the president’s behavior that they began investigating whether he had been working on behalf of Russia against American interests,” actions that could have constituted a threat to national security, whether the president was “knowingly working for Russia or had unwittingly fallen under Moscow’s influence.” For those so broken by the past two years that they cannot remember whether it’s normal for the president of the United States to be investigated as a possible foreign asset, spoiler alert: it’s not! It also means that the election-collusion angle being probed by special prosecutor Robert Mueller is only part of the story. (Both the F.B.I. and the special counsel’s office declined the Times’s request for comment, and Rudy Giuliani, the president’s lawyer, told the paper that, clearly, investigators had “found nothing.”)

Shortly after the Times story broke, The Washington Post came out with its own weekend-ruining scoop, reporting, among other things:

President Trump has gone to extraordinary lengths to conceal details of his conversations with Russian President Vladi­mir Putin, including on at least one occasion taking possession of the notes of his own interpreter and instructing the linguist not to discuss what had transpired with other administration officials, current and former U.S. officials said.