Nick Akerman, a former Watergate prosecutor, said Trump manages to “worm out of things” by making his bad behavior so blatant.

“I think the normal reaction for a lot of people is that something that someone does in public, it takes away the idea that it’s nefarious,” Akerman said. “They think, ‘Would he really be doing it in public if there was something wrong with it?’”…

Barbara McQuade, a former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan, said Trump’s confounding public behavior — for example, she said, “he says stuff in tweets that seems blatantly illegal” — allows for two competing theories.

“Are we giving him too much credit and he’s just so undisciplined that he can’t help but say and tweet these things?” she asked. “Or is he so diabolical that putting it out there is like a jujitsu move?”