WASHINGTON _ The exchange was as brief as it was definitive.
Aboard Air Force One in April, a reporter asked President Donald Trump whether he knew about a $130,000 payment that his lawyer, Michael Cohen, made to Stormy Daniels, a porn actress, shortly before the election.
For a fleeting moment, Trump paused and pursed his lips, as if deciding what to do next. Then he chose to do what he's often done _ he lied.
"No. No," Trump said.
Throughout his meteoric political rise, Trump dismissed, ignored and denied reports of sexual misbehavior, tax avoidance and opaque business practices. Often he would respond to questions about falsehoods with even more falsehoods.
But now, nearly two years after he entered the White House, Trump's lies appear to be catching up to him.
Federal prosecutors in New York last week that they have meticulously deconstructed the hush-money scheme that kept two women _ Daniels and Karen McDougal, a former Playboy playmate _ from speaking publicly before the election about alleged affairs with Trump.
Meanwhile, special counsel Robert Mueller has refuted Trump's claim that he had "nothing to do with Russia" by revealing that well into his presidential campaign he was seeking to build a luxury tower in Moscow as he was proposing closer relations between the United States and the Kremlin.
Both investigations _ one into campaign finance, the other into possible ties between Trump and Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 presidential election _ could produce new evidence of dishonesty.
"The legal system has provided a dose of reality to Trump's world that it hasn't met with in a political context yet," said Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Democratic nominee Hillary Clinton during the campaign.
In the policy realm, too, false statements by Trump have begun to have consequences. This month, for example, Trump claimed that he and China's president, Xi Jinping, had worked out an "an incredible deal" on trade. Within a day, the White House had to back away from that claim, contributing to a sharp decline in the stock market.
And Thursday, the Senate voted to end U.S. support for Saudi Arabia's war in Yemen _ an unprecedented use of the War Powers Act that reflected the anger that many senators have against Trump's refusal to accept evidence that Saudi Arabia's crown prince was culpable in the killing of the U.S.-based journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Trump has never been shy about playing loose with the facts. In his 1987 book, "The Art of the Deal," he said playing to people's fantasies was an important way to promote his business and his properties.
"People want to believe that something is the biggest and the greatest and the most spectacular," he said. "I call it truthful hyperbole. It's an innocent form of exaggeration_and a very effective form of promotion."
He was long known for grandiose, often false statements about the height of his buildings, the size of his wealth and the beauty of his women.
Since taking office, Washington Post fact checkers have tallied roughly 6,500 false claims by Trump. Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., who is likely to be the next House speaker, calls the Oval Office an "evidence-free zone."
But whatever the business and political worlds' tolerance for falsehoods, the legal system is much less forgiving. So far, four of Trump's associates ��his former campaign foreign policy adviser, George Papadopoulos; Cohen; his first national security adviser, Michael Flynn; and his former deputy campaign chairman, Rick Gates �� have pleaded guilty to lying.
Trump could now face similar jeopardy, having answered written questions from Mueller's office last month. It's a crime to lie to federal investigators and his lawyers long resisted letting Trump, who is prone to false statements, sit for an in-person interview with investigators.
It's unlikely that Trump would be charged while in office. But lying under oath was one of two charges on which President Bill Clinton was impeached two decades ago.
Henry Pontell, a professor at John Jay College in New York City and an expert on white-collar crime, said Trump fits a familiar pattern of wealthy, successful people who come to believe they can get away with creating their own versions of reality.
"A lot of white-collar criminals have an illusion of invulnerability, especially high-status individuals who have a feeling that they aren't going to be touched by the law," Pontell said. "Because their status and wealth protects them, this illusion of invulnerability may be exacerbated to the point that the lying continues all the way up until the lights go out. "But Trump's illusion of invulnerability is unparalleled to anything I've ever seen."
Trump is loath to admit any fault when forced to confront his previous false statements. Instead he responds like a retreating army that refuses to surrender. Forced out of one foxhole, he's fallen back to another, only to reposition himself again and again.
No scenario has illustrated Trump's strategy _ and its limitations _ better than his approach to disclosures about the hush-money payments to Daniels and McDougal.
On the Air Force One flight where Trump denied knowing about the Daniels payment, he also said he didn't know where Cohen got the money. One month later, he was changing his story in an awkwardly worded series of Twitter posts.
"Mr. Cohen, an attorney, received a monthly retainer, not from the campaign and having nothing to do with the campaign, from which he entered into, through reimbursement, a private contract between two parties, known as a nondisclosure agreement, or NDA," Trump posted.
First, Cohen pleaded guilty in August to violating campaign finance laws by arranging the payments, one of which was made by American Media Inc., a tabloid publisher run by a Trump ally.
Cohen said Trump directed the payments himself, an assertion backed up by the U.S. attorney's office in New York, which is handling the investigation. Prosecutors bolstered their case Wednesday when, shortly after Cohen was sentenced to three years in prison for a variety of crimes, they revealed a non-prosecution agreement with American Media.
The company admitted to paying McDougal $150,000 for the rights to her story and never running it, an arrangement that had as its "principal purpose" keeping her story out of the news before the election, the agreement said.
In the face of all those revelations, the president no longer denies knowing about the payments, claiming only that he didn't tell Cohen to do anything illegal.
"I never directed Michael Cohen to break the law," Trump said in a Twitter post Thursday. "He was a lawyer, and he is supposed to know the law."
He continues, however, to insist that the payments were "a simple private transaction."
Cohen, on ABC's "Good Morning America" Friday, Cohen said Trump is lying.
"He knows the truth, I know the truth, others know the truth, and here is the truth: The people of the United States of America, people of the world, don't believe what he is saying," Cohen said. "The man doesn't tell the truth."
Cohen also pleaded guilty last month to lying to Congress about pursuing a Moscow real estate deal during the campaign. Although he previously said the proposal was dropped in January 2016, before the Iowa caucuses, he admitted that it wasn't abandoned until after Trump secured the Republican nomination.
The project would have almost certainly needed Russian government approval, and the negotiations were held at the same time the Kremlin was starting a covert campaign to meddle in the U.S. election by hacking Democratic Party emails and spreading misinformation on social media.
Cohen's admission undermined Trump's earlier claims that he had nothing to do with Russia.
"I know nothing about the inner workings of Russia," Trump said in his second debate with Hillary Clinton. "I don't deal there. I have no businesses there."
One month after taking office, Trump said at a news conference: "I have nothing to do with Russia. To the best of my knowledge, no person that I deal with does."
Since Cohen's guilty plea, Trump has once again fallen back to another position about the Moscow real estate proposal.
He called the Moscow project "very legal and very cool" on Twitter. And, he said: "If I did do it, there would have been nothing wrong. This was my business."
Trump hadn't publicly discussed the project during the campaign, when he was pushing for the United States to have closer relations to Russia.
But he insisted the reality was something different.
"We were very open about it," Trump said.
