Whether or not you consider James Comey to have dropped any bombshells in his testimony before the Senate last week, the former FBI director provided details of his interactions with Donald Trump that should disturb all Americans. Indeed, as various observers have been pointing out, the ever-escalating outrages perpetrated by this president are making it difficult for many to fully comprehend the seriousness of Comey’s testimony. In various ways, Comey’s testimony dramatized and embodied the confrontation between our system of laws and Donald Trump’s tendencies towards lawlessness. The setting itself, an open Senate proceeding, contrasts sharply with the series of interactions that Comey described, in which the president sought, in one-on-one sessions, to pressure Comey to pledge his loyalty to the president and abandon FBI investigations. And Comey’s sworn and precisely worded testimony couldn’t be further from the contradictory lies and story lines that the president has tweeted and otherwise uttered about the events in question.

Indeed, the sense that Comey is telling the truth is only enhanced by Trump’s self-serving responses to his testimony. In the way that Team Trump has declared itself vindicated by what the Comey said, they’ve engaged in a form of obvious cherry-picking. On the one hand, Trump has said that Comey lied in his testimony; on the other, Trump is relying on certain statements by Comey to support Trump’s own positions. But by the president’s logic, of course, how can we trust anything Comey has said? And how then does it make any sort of logical sense that the president’s attorneys are going to file a complaint about Comey’s leak of his own memos about his conversations with the president, when the president himself says that what Comey wrote in the memos are lies?

You can see more clearly than ever the two fields of struggle where the question over Donald Trump’s fitness for office is being played out. There is the legal inquiry into whether Trump or people around him broke any laws; in the case of the president, Comey’s testimony highlighted whether Trump has engaged in obstruction of justice. But there is also the political realm, where Trump clearly would prefer to battle things out. Among other things, politics is the realm where appearances matter, and so it’s important for Trump to claim vindication from the Comey testimony even when the testimony clearly raised the possibility of real legal risk for the president. This is also the realm where Trump can use the power of his bully pulpit to disparage and otherwise malign the former FBI director. And short of charges actually being brought against the president (which many experts say the Justice Department would never do), whether this president is removed from office will be a political judgment made by Congress, in a decision whether to impeach and convict the president based on the facts the investigations have brought and will continue to bring to light.

Our gut feeling at this point is that the president and his team know they are likely to lose the legal fight, and so are determined to play this out on the political battlefield. But this only shows the weakness of their position. The investigations are truly a ticking time bomb for this administration, and if enough damning facts come to light, their ability to spin them away will become increasingly fraught. Indeed, there may come a point when spin in the face of undeniable reality becomes transparently self-serving and self-destructive.

It is also worth noting that at a basic level of legal competence, the president appears to be relying on lawyers who are loyal and known to him at the expense of lawyers who might be better suited to the particular legal peril he finds himself in. And this piece raises the possibility that in his relentless push to protect numero uno, Trump may end up alienating members of his administration in ways that could come back to haunt him. This can be contrasted with the legal team special counsel Robert Mueller is putting together, which appears to be a formidable collection of expertise and experience.