KEEP RUDY SPEAKING AND DONALD TWEETING:

Watergate happened in audio. Bless his patriotic soul, President Nixon generously bugged his own offices and tapped his own phones. It was Nixon's own unmistakable voice, conspiring on dirty tricks and putative obstruction of justice, that checkmated him.

President Trump is also his own wiretap, and he may yet checkmate himself. But he uses another medium, another form of speech and another genre to wreck himself. Trump's chronic self-incrimination -- most of it, anyway -- is not audio; it exists in tweets and on TV.

From his televised request for more Kremlin hacks -- "Russia, if you're listening" -- to his NBC confession that he fired the FBI director to snuff out the Russia investigation, Trump makes sure to get just about every micron of his venality on the record.

And nowhere does he do it more flagrantly than on Twitter. One example: The syntax and content of "No Collusion or Obstruction (other than I fight back)," from last month, was read by the journalist Jonathan Chait and others as a tacit confession that Trump was saying that he did, under the rubric of fighting back, obstruct justice.

But there are also tweets that constitute a kind of trespass in themselves.

Trump had spent much of Sunday railing against the year-old special counsel probe into his campaign, when just after 1:30 p.m., he wrote, "I hereby demand, and will do so officially tomorrow, that the Department of Justice look into whether or not the FBI/DOJ infiltrated or surveilled the Trump Campaign for Political Purposes -- and if any such demands or requests were made by people within the Obama Administration!"

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