This is a good point but I was thinking about the context in his second term, not his first. Clearly he knew that, at some level, he was bulletproof in term #2. People literally brought him back after his partisans' actions on Capitol Hill. He's so old that there is no way he ever spends time in jail.

All of these machinations are, to me, an effort to avoid legal prosecution when he thought they could be effective against him. At this point, you could share the supposed piss tape and no one would care.

In one sense, a lot of what he does is to avoid shame. The man is insanely thin skinned.