It’s not just that he really, really wants this scandal to go away since it has been turning swaths of his normally cult-like base against him.

No, there’s another element – and a brutal one for the president. It’s where the story was published: in the Wall Street Journal, whose conservative opinion side has often backed him and whose news side has a reputation for ensuring that explosive stories are bulletproof: accurate in their facts and fully prepared to stand up under legal scrutiny.