Has Rudy Giuliani, Donald Trump’s legal adviser and cable-news ambassador, completely lost it? His antics on Monday make you wonder whether the seventy-four-year-old former mayor of New York is now doing more to harm the President than to help him.

Giuliani’s latest media meltdown began early, on CNN’s “New Day,” where the co-host, Alisyn Camerota, asked him about the trial of Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign manager, which is scheduled to begin on Tuesday. Referring to the relatively short amount of time that Manafort spent as Trump’s campaign manager, in 2016, Giuliani replied, “Four months, they’re not going to be colluding with Russia, which, I don’t even know if that’s a crime, colluding about Russians. You start analyzing the crime—the hacking is the crime. The President didn’t hack.”

Was Giuliani just talking off the top of his head? Or was he deliberately trying to shift the goalposts? Since the campaign, Trump and his surrogates have consistently denied that they knowingly colluded in any way with the Russian government’s efforts to disrupt the 2016 election. Was Giuliani opening the door to a different kind of argument? When he then appeared on the Fox News morning show, “Fox & Friends”—as friendly terrain as exists for the Trump Administration—it certainly sounded like it. “I have been sitting here looking in the federal code trying to find collusion as a crime,” Giuliani said. “Collusion is not a crime.”

Strictly speaking, Giuliani was correct: the phrase “colluding with foreign governments” doesn’t appear in the U.S. criminal code. But conspiring with foreign nationals to interfere with an election is a felony offense, and “collusion” is usually used as shorthand for that crime.

And that was only the start of it. Giuliani’s appearance on “New Day” lasted more than half an hour, and, in another moment, he brought up two meetings at Trump Tower that may or may not have taken place on or around June 9, 2016, the day that Donald Trump, Jr., Jared Kushner, and Manafort met with a group of Russians who they were told had dirt on Hillary Clinton. The President has consistently denied that he knew about this get-together before it happened. But last week, sources close to Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer and lawyer, let it be known that he is willing to testify otherwise: that, in fact, Trump did have advance notice.

Few details have since emerged about how Cohen would go about corroborating this assertion—until Giuliani supplied them. “Cohen always goes too far, and when you’re lying there’s always a trap for you,” he told Camerota, seemingly apropos of nothing. Then he raised the prospect of the two set-up meetings. “He said there was a one-on-one meeting, that Donald, Jr., came in and told him”—meaning Trump, Sr.—“the meeting was about to take place.” This meeting between Trump, Sr., and Trump, Jr., Giuliani said, allegedly took place on June 9th—the day of the Russia meeting—but “Donald [Jr.] denies, the President denies, there is no corroboration.” The other set-up meeting took place two days before, and it involved “Donald, Jr., Jared, Manafort, and two others: Gates”—Rick Gates, Manafort’s deputy—“and one more person,” Giuliani went on. “That’s a real meeting on another provable subject, in which he”—Cohen—“did not participate.”

Giuliani’s statements about Trump and Russia were convoluted and confusing, and they raised more questions than they answered—if they answered any questions at all. Evidently, it didn’t take long for Trump’s lawyers—the ones who actually do legal work—and communications advisers to realize they had another fine mess on their hands. And so, by noon, Giuliani was back on television—this time calling into the Fox News show “Outnumbered”—and clarifying some of his earlier statements, sort of.

He began by addressing his claims about collusion: “It’s a very, very familiar lawyers’ argument that … my client didn’t do it, and, even if he did it, it’s not a crime. I have said that over and over again: collusion is not a crime. The only crime here is hacking, and it is ridiculous to think that the President hacked.”

That was contentious, but its meaning was clear enough: Giuliani was indeed moving the goalposts, arguing that anything short of concrete proof tying Trump to the Russians’ theft of Democratic e-mails wouldn’t amount to anything. But what about his reference to two meetings at Trump Tower?

“That actually takes on a question that had not been asked, or even suggested,” one of the hosts, Harris Faulkner, pointed out. “So why did you say that?”

Giuliani’s basic answer was that he feared the other side—Cohen and his lawyer, Lanny Davis—were trying to get journalists to write about the two meetings, and he was trying to get out ahead of the story. “There are two different meetings, one of which has leaked out, and the other of which has been given to three reporters, and Jay Sekulow and I have been successful, I think, in beating it back,” he said.

After that, Giuliani gave a few more details about the alleged meetings, starting with the one involving the two Trumps. “He’s leaked it, so we’re not even sure he said it,” Giuliani said, referring to Cohen. “Someone has said it for him through a reporter. He said that he was in Donald Trump’s office, Donald Trump, Jr., walked in and told him about the Russian meeting. That is categorically untrue. Did not happen. Two witnesses demonstrate that.”

Turning to the other meeting, Giuliani changed his line a bit. First, he said, Cohen alleges it took place three days before the Russia meeting. Giuliani then denied it had ever happened. “We checked with their lawyers—the ones we could check with, four of the six. That meeting never, ever took place. It didn’t happen. It’s a figment of his imagination, or he’s lying. The only meeting they find for that day that including any of these people was a meeting about the Hispanic judge that the President had criticized back around that time. So that hopefully sets the record straight.”

Not exactly. The timeline still strongly suggests that Trump indeed had advance notice of the Russia meeting. On June 7th, 2016, the very day when Trump, Jr., Manafort, Kushner, and others did or did not have an advance meeting about it, Trump publicly announced that he would be making another speech a few days later, in which he would reveal a bunch of new and damaging material on Clinton. What gave him that idea if not a belief that some Russians were about to deliver the dirt?

To be sure, it’s still not clear where Cohen fits in. If he is making up stuff, federal investigators will eventually find that out, and he won’t be able to damage the President. If he’s telling the truth, and can provide some backing for his claims, then nothing Giuliani says will make much difference. So why is he out there making an ass of himself, and, by extension, the President, on a regular basis?

Most likely, there are some people in the White House asking this question, too. But don’t expect Giuliani to be silenced anytime soon. Convinced that the special counsel, Robert Mueller, will never indict a sitting President, Trump and his closest allies see this whole thing as a political battle that will be decided in the court of public opinion. In conducting their side of the fight, they are happy to have Giuliani out there attacking the other team, day after day, even if he bloodies himself in the process. It’s far from clear that what Giuliani said and did on Monday, embarrassing as it was, will change this calculus.