On Monday, President Donald Trump learned that F.B.I. agents had raided an office and a hotel apartment that were the territory of Michael Cohen, his personal lawyer. Reportedly, the agents took away material that touched on aspects of the President’s own life—including a hush-money payment made to Stormy Daniels, an adult-film actress and director whose legal name is Stephanie Clifford. The raid made the President angry. It was, he said, “a whole new level of unfairness.”

“So, I just heard that they broke into the office of one of my personal attorneys—a good man,” Trump began, speaking to reporters just ahead of a meeting with military leaders. One might stop and examine those words before stepping farther into the Trumpian maelstrom. “They” were carrying a warrant that a U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York had sought and a federal judge had approved; they were not burglars in the night. According to a statement that Cohen’s lawyer gave to the press, the U.S. Attorney in question, Geoffrey Berman, had acted in response to a referral from Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating possible Russian interference in the 2016 Presidential election. (Cohen’s lawyer also said that the search was “completely inappropriate and unnecessary.”) Presumably, Mueller found something on the edges of his investigation that he thought a prosecutor ought to see, and the prosecutors agreed. Just a few days ago, Trump himself claimed that the “good man,” his lawyer, had paid the hush money—a hundred and thirty thousand dollars—to Clifford without telling him, which, by any standard, would be a breach of legal ethics. The President may have been lying about his ignorance of the payment; if not, he ought to have had a notion that there might be some questions about Cohen’s lawyering practices.

That’s not how Trump sees it. “It’s a disgraceful situation,” he continued. “It’s a total witch hunt.” Directed at whom? Hush-agreement negotiation is not Cohen’s only line of work. As a lawyer at the Trump Organization, he dealt with some matters related to Russia; that connection continued during the campaign. It is not yet clear which of these tangled lines the U.S. Attorney is pursuing, or what the relation of the raid to other areas that Mueller is looking at might be. (Another issue is whether the prospect of serious legal trouble might make Cohen a more amenable witness for Mueller.) There has always been a blurriness to the borders of Trump’s businesses, but the President spoke as though the raid on Cohen’s office were an attack on him personally, and of a piece with the entire Mueller investigation. “We’ve given, I believe, over a million pages’ worth of documents to the special counsel,” he told the reporters. He wanted to talk about Syria and the ways that he might use “the greatest fighting force ever” there. Instead, he was dealing with what he again called a “witch hunt,” and a “disgrace.”

The most striking parts of Trump’s remarks, though, concerned what he might do about Mueller’s investigation. “I’ve been saying it for a long time. I’ve wanted to keep it down,” he said, without quite explaining how you keep a man like Mueller “down.” Will the President fire him, and, perhaps, add to whatever obstruction-of-justice case Mueller is already building? As I’ve written before, Trump and his legal team have taken almost every step they could to escalate, rather than quiet, the Clifford story. (He also took the time to complain to the reporters that Attorney General Jeff Sessions had recused himself from the Russian investigation and that Hillary Clinton was not being investigated for “the horrible things that she did and all of the crimes that were committed.”) He sounded as if he were trying to build a case for dismissing the special counsel, referring to Mueller and his investigators as “the most biased group of people. These people have the biggest conflicts of interest I’ve ever seen.”

Indeed, when a reporter asked why he didn’t, as the reporter put it, “just fire the guy,” the President, after again stating that the whole thing was a disgrace, answered, “We’ll see what happens.” He observed that “many people have said, ‘You should fire him,’ ” without saying who those people might be. After a brief digression to defend the firing, last summer, of James Comey, the F.B.I. director—“Well, I turned out to do the right thing”—the President repeated, “So we’ll see what happens.”

Trump also said, “It’s an attack on our country, in a true sense. It’s an attack on what we all stand for.” He was still talking about the raid on Cohen’s office, but he made it sound—dangerously—like treason. And how will this President, with all his powers, deal with that?