“Rudy Giuliani figured it out,” said a familiar voice. I was approaching Terrace Hill on my afternoon walk last week when my friend K.C. suddenly appeared, as he often does, when I least expected him.

“Figured what out?” I asked.

“That no one cares about Donald Trump’s lies,” K.C. said.

“For months,” he said, “President Trump has denied that he reimbursed Michael Cohen $130,000 to pay off porn star Stormy Daniels.

“Then, Giuliani goes on Fox TV and says Trump did pay Cohen. Everyone thought Giuliani had committed a huge faux pas, until the next day when Trump tweeted his own admission.

“Giuliani figured out that Trump’s lies don’t matter,” K.C. said. “Not with his base, anyway.” 

“Think about it,” he continued. “During the 2016 campaign, and even after Trump took office, news reporters were careful about how they characterized Trump’s untrue statements. Most were reluctant to call him an outright liar.

“Now, everybody does. But nobody cares. Even evangelical Christians, who you’d think would care about things like honesty and sexual promiscuity, don’t seem to care.

“I’m guessing that after Giuliani joined Trump’s legal team, he said something like this:

“‘Hey, boss, don’t sweat the small stuff. People know you lie, and they don’t care.

“‘If the special prosecutor is going to get you, it won’t be for a crime that you say you didn’t commit. It will be for obstruction of justice. That’s what brought down Nixon and nearly did in Bill Clinton.’

“Obstruction is always easier to prove than a real crime,” K.C. explained. “It’s easier to prove perjury than collusion or conspiracy. Rudy told Trump to clean up his lies, before they became perjury. He probably told Trump that if he cleaned up his lies, he could tell special prosecutor Robert Mueller to take a hike.”

“So,” I said, “you think that, if Trump goes back and corrects his lies, Mueller won’t be able to touch him?”

“Not at all,” K.C. said. “That’s what Giuliani thinks. But he’s nearly as senile as Orrin Hatch. “I think Mueller has done a good job of rounding up evidence,” K.C. said. “Did you see the list of questions he wants to ask the president?

“There were more than 40 questions on the list that the New York Times printed. They covered everything from the president’s fixer lawyer Michael Cohen to the firing of FBI Director James Comey. Mueller also wants to know what Trump did when he learned that Attorney General Jeff Sessions would recuse himself from the Russia investigation. And he wants to explore any and all connections between Trump and his campaign and Russians.

“It looks to me like Mueller is slowly tightening the noose,” K.C. said. “And Trump has been helping every step of the way.”

“That doesn’t make sense,” I said. “Trump has been resisting tooth and nail.”

“Yes and no,” K.C said. “Trump doesn’t realize it, but he is his own worst enemy. You know how he loves Twitter and can’t resist tweeting about anything and everything that involves him?”

“Sure,” I said. “They say it’s his way of going around the news media to stay in direct touch with his supporters.”

“He’s doing more than staying in touch with his people,” K.C. said. “His tweets created a trail, just like the one Hansel and Gretel left in the forest with breadcrumbs. Only his tweets won’t lead him out of the woods.”

“Mueller is using Trump’s tweets to create a road map to everything Trump has done, or wanted to do, in the past three years.

“It’s all in the breadcrumbs,” K.C. said as he walked away.