The bad news is that Donald Trump is the most incompetent president in modern American history. The good news is that Donald Trump is the most incompetent president in modern American history.

He was too incompetent to understand his own health care bill, or accurately describe the direction in which the “armada” designed to intimidate North Korea was heading, or restrain himself from disclosing highly classified information to Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov and Russian Ambassador Sergei Kislyak. But he’s also too incompetent, it appears, to destroy liberal democracy.

When Trump fired James Comey a week ago, many Republicans denied that he had done so to shut down the FBI’s inquiry into his campaign’s Russia ties. Trump, they said, could not have been that stupid. He could not have been stupid enough to believe that firing Comey would quash the Russia investigation.

But, increasingly, it appears that Trump was. Rather than building a high-minded pretext for firing Comey, Trump, according to the New York Times, invited Comey to dinner in January and demanded his personal loyalty. If that wasn’t incriminating enough, in February he baldly asked Comey to end the investigation into former National Security Advisor Michael Flynn. Then, after Comey asked for more funding to investigate the Trump campaign’s Russia ties, Trump fired him—essentially asking the man he had handed a loaded gun to fire it at his head.