The Trump omniscandal—which is really four or five separate but related scandals swirling around each other in a boiling stew of venal criminality—is slowly coming into focus. When that process is complete, it may wind up being simultaneously less than many believe, and more appalling than we could have imagined. It's important to keep that in mind, because as we get each new revelation we have a tendency to measure it against our expectations of what a real scandal ought to look like, expectations that may make it harder to come to grips with all the places these investigations are taking us. Specifically, we yearn for a kind of narrative coherence in which motivations are simple, individuals' actions make sense, and the whole thing has at least some measure of organization to it. We've been taught by innumerable movies and TV shows what a conspiracy looks like, and one of its characteristics is that things become more clear as you move along. What had seemed like a...

Let me suggest an image from the near future and see what your reaction is. It's a few months from now, and Michael Cohen is being led into a police station in Manhattan in handcuffs, his jacket slightly askew, his face wearing an expression that's two-thirds defiance, one-third fear. In fact, you might have pictured that already yourself. If you look at Cohen on the news and say, "Oh yeah, that guy's definitely going to jail for something," you are not alone. While Cohen is usually described as "Donald Trump's personal lawyer," in fact he was much more: a deal-maker, a problem-solver, and the guy Trump would turn to if he wanted to threaten somebody. "If somebody does something Mr. Trump doesn't like, I do everything in my power to resolve it to Mr. Trump's benefit," Cohen once told ABC News . "If you do something wrong, I'm going to come at you, grab you by the neck and I'm not going to let you go until I'm finished." If there are shady things going on in the Trump organization,...