Meanwhile, the risk grows that Trump will exercise some sort of nuclear option to rid himself of the whole business. Laying out Trump’s avenues of counterattack would require another column, but the president has multiple levers beyond the most incendiary tack of ordering his deputy attorney general, Rod Rosenstein, to fire Mueller. He can try to replace Rosenstein with a pliable stand-in who will ride herd on Mueller; he can rescind the special counsel regulations that protect Mueller; or he can simply attempt to fire the whole team and lock the doors as an exercise of raw executive power. Any one of these would result in bedlam and court battles that would likely tie up the probe for months.