Amid an unrelenting week of Russian intrigues, punctuated briefly by the collapse of the Republican health-care bill, Donald Trump sat down with his favorite “failing” newspaper, The New York Times, for a remarkable interview Wednesday. For another president, it might have been an opportunity to reset and recenter the national conversation around his agenda. But fifty minutes spent with the “fake news” media appears to have gone to Trump’s head. The resulting transcript begins like a Samuel Beckett play—Trump moves, glancingly, from Emmanuel Macron (“loves holding my hand”) to health care (“they’ll vote on this ... We don’t have bad people. I know the bad people. Believe me, do I know bad people.”) with a brief cameo from his Chinese-speaking granddaughter (“She speaks fluent Chinese ... Say, like, ‘I love you, Grandpa’”)—before devolving, inevitably, into Richard II. Still furious over the multiple federal inquiries into alleged collusion between his campaign and Russia, the president lashed out at virtually the entire law-enforcement apparatus responsible for the investigation, a bout of monomania that made explicit his view that any perceived lack of loyalty would be seen not just as a “conflict of interest,” but as a personal betrayal.

First in the firing line was Attorney General Jeff Sessions, whom the president has reportedly resented ever since he followed protocol and removed himself from directing an investigation in which he is also a person of interest. “Sessions should have never recused himself,” Trump grumbled. “And if he was going to recuse himself he should have told me before he took the job and I would have picked somebody else.” Picking someone else might have allowed Trump to avoid the subsequent chain of events, which saw Sessions’s deputy, Rod Rosenstein, appoint special counsel Robert Mueller to oversee the probe, which Trump has blusteringly deemed “the single greatest WITCH HUNT in American political history.” It also would have saved Sessions from misstepping during his Senate confirmation hearing, during which he said he had not had “communications with the Russians” despite having met at least twice with Ambassador Sergey Kislyak. “Jeff Sessions gave some bad answers,” Trump fumed. “He gave some answers that were simple questions and should have been simple answers, but they weren’t.”

Trump’s open attack on his longtime ally has sparked speculation that Sessions will resign, with Axios reporting that Republicans are apparently waging “stay” and “go” predictions. Sessions skirted the rumors Thursday, saying that he and his colleagues intend to continue to do their jobs. That should please Trump, given that Sessions’s resignation would also elevate Rosenstein, the aforementioned architect of Mueller’s ascendancy.

Then again, in his interview with the Times, Trump evidenced little concern about firing people who displease him, or of trashing their reputations in conversations with reporters. Asked about James Comey, the former F.B.I. director whom he fired in May, prompting the appointment of the special counsel, Trump’s irritation dilated to ire. Showing just how far he is willing to go to discredit those who he deems to have crossed him, he claimed that, when Comey briefed him on the salacious Steele dossier in January, he believed that Comey was trying to blackmail him in some way. “In my opinion, he shared it so that I would think he had it out there,” Trump said. Asked to clarify if he thought Comey was trying to exert leverage, he responded, “Yeah, I think so,” before emphatically denying the contents of the dossier: “When he brought it to me, I said this is really made-up junk. I didn’t think about any of it. I just thought about, man, this is such a phony deal.” (Comey testified before Congress that he revealed the details of the dossier because he thought that the media would soon be publishing them, and that the incoming president had a right to know.)

Trump also refuted Comey’s damning claim that, in a one-on-one meeting in the White House, the president asked him to drop an investigation into former national security adviser Michael Flynn. Comey testified that Trump asked the vice president, attorney general and other administration officials to leave the room, before presenting his request to Comey. “I don’t remember even talking to him about any of this stuff,” Trump told the Times. “He said I asked people to go. Look, you look at his testimony. His testimony is loaded up with lies, O.K.?” But, despite the perpetually unfolding consequences of firing Comey, which has seen Trump fielding accusations of obstruction of justice, he remained steadfastly cheery about his decision. “I did a great thing for the American people.”

One person who Trump does not think is Making America Great Again is Mueller, whose investigation is assiduously circling the president and his inner circle. The team he has assembled are notable for their specific areas of expertise, which span money-laundering, financial transactions, and Russia. Andrew Weissman, who worked on the Enron case, is flanked, among others, by Lisa Page, a Justice department trial attorney with a record of investigation into Russian and former Soviet organized crime. Asked if Mueller would be crossing a red line if he examined the Trump family finances beyond any links to Russia, Trump replied: “I would say yes.” He didn't say he would have him fired, but added: “Look, this is about Russia.”

It was timely, then, that it emerged Thursday that Mueller’s team is, as expected, examining a broad range of transactions involving Trump’s businesses as well as those of his associates, according to a person familiar with the probe. F.B.I investigators and others are apparently looking at Russian purchases of apartments in Trump buildings, Trump’s involvement in a SoHo development with Russian associates, the 2013 Miss Universe pageant in Moscow and Trump’s sale of a Florida mansion to a Russian oligarch in 2008, reports Bloomberg. Meanwhile, according to the Guardian, Mueller’s investigation is expected to subpoena or request data from the president’s longtime banker, Deutsche Bank.

As Mueller ploughs on with the job he has been officially assigned to complete, Trump rehashed his favored series of complaints against the special counsel, noting that lawyers in his office contributed money to Clinton’s campaign, and stressing that he interviewed Mueller to replace Comey just before his appointment. “He was up here and he wanted the job,” Trump said. After he was named special counsel, “I said, ‘What the hell is this all about?’ Talk about conflicts. But he was interviewing for the job. There were many other conflicts that I haven’t said, but I will at some point.”

The problem for Trump, as news of Mueller’s expanded investigation confirms, is that the special counsel—a longtime civil servant at the end of an illustrious career—will not be deterred by vague threats. Nor has Trump learned that with each effort to assert his dominance and demand loyalty, he puts himself in greater legal jeopardy. The more Trump launches personal attacks, the more he arouses suspicion; the more he says, the more he reveals. Pushing Russia to the top of the headlines will backfire, and simply spur the special counsel on. Positioning himself at the center of this drama might not be a wise move.

As Trump’s son Donald Jr., son-in-law Jared Kushner, and former campaign manager Paul Manafort prepare to testify before the Senate Intelligence Committee, less than two weeks after it emerged that they met a Kremlin-linked lawyer offering damaging information on Hillary Clinton, Trump’s inverted use of the term “conflict of interest” seems increasingly Orwellian. Just as the word “adoption” seems to have become synonymous with “U.S. sanctions” in the Trumpian lexicon, so the term “conflict of interest” seems to refer to “federal law officers who stick to their oaths,” rather than Trump’s opus.