Donald Trump is scared.

Or so he seems, at least to judge from the interview he did with the Fox News anchor Bret Baier that aired over the past two evenings. Trump was jittery and combative, but that’s not so unusual; the former president tends to answer even softball questions as if they’re accusations. Typically, when confronted with more serious challenges, he deploys his peculiar political glossolalia, verbal fusillades formed out of names and places and phrases plucked from jumbled memories, old talking points, and barely remembered briefings.

But something was different this time. Trump seemed not himself—or at least not the character he’s been presenting to the public for most of his life.

Instead, he seemed deeply uneasy in an environment where he should have felt at home. The hosts of Fox News have been, for the most part, staunch supporters of the 45th president, repeating Trump’s many grievances and echoing his lies about how the 2020 election was rigged and stolen. Fox, after all, is the network that proved its commitment to Trump by shelling out $787.5 million as the price of supporting his fantasies about voting machines. And yet, by the end of the interview, Trump was calling Fox a “hostile” network.

Through it all, Trump seemed genuinely off-balance. (Even some of the Fox analysts noticed it; the longtime Fox anchor and Trump defender Brit Hume, for one, said Trump’s answers about his legal dilemmas “verged on incoherent.”) This was not the same Trump who took instant charge of CNN’s town-hall interview, in which he owned a New Hampshire stage and bulldozed the CNN anchor Kaitlan Collins out of his way while playing to a hooting and applauding crowd.

[Read: Inside the meltdown at CNN]

What happened to that more confident Trump? And why did he—or anyone on his staff—think it would be a good idea to sit in a quiet room, alone with an experienced reporter?

If Trump thought the interview was a chance to work the refs on his court case and soften up public opinion, he chose the wrong venue. Trump relies on the energy he gets from proximity to his supporters. For a man who has spent so many years on television, Trump seems uncomfortable in a studio unless an audience is present. His natural habitat is not the tranquil interview salon but the packed house, the rally, the press conference, where he can line up his opponents—liberals, other Republican candidates, his former staff, reporters—like ducks in a rhetorical shooting gallery, each hollow metallic ding of a hit producing a roar of applause.

Trump’s discomfort had a lot to do with Baier. One-on-one interviews are hard for Trump, because they require him to focus on individual human beings and engage with them as if he cares about—or even heard—what they just said. He always runs the risk that the other person might continue to ask pointed questions even after he has wandered into some incomprehensible reverie. Perhaps Trump was expecting a Fox anchor to cut him a break in such an arrangement; instead, Baier came prepared, and pushed back—with data—on many of Trump’s claims. Given how extreme so many of Trump’s no-one-ever-did-anything-better-than-me statements tend to be, pushing back might not seem so difficult, but credit where it is due: Baier interrupted Trump, corrected him, and challenged him on multiple fronts, including his election lies, his indictments, his record as president, his involvement in the January 6 insurrection, and even his predilection for silly nicknames.  

Baier brought quotes, sound clips, and charts. (CNN’s Collins, undermined by the structure of a live interview in front of a partisan audience, never had a chance to do anything similar.) Trump clearly hated the whole experience this time, and he retreated to his comfort zone, dismissing facts, insulting the people who once worked for him, belittling Fox’s ratings, and accusing the network of bias against him.

“I’m no great fan of Fox,” Trump complained at one point. “You’re sitting here,” Baier responded calmly. “Well, you gotta get your word out somehow, right?” Trump mumbled, with that sullen, childlike affect that is always so disconcerting to see in a man closer to 80 than 8.

Trump’s ire, however, alternated with what the Fox analyst Juan Williams insightfully described as a kind of detachment from the whole business. When Trump went on, for example, about how he’d give the death penalty to drug dealers, Baier interrupted to note that Trump had pardoned a drug dealer named Alice Johnson, who, under his new plan, would have been executed. “Huh?” Trump responded, with evident confusion. “No, no. No. Under my, oh, under that? Uh, it would depend on the severity.” But Baier pressed on: Johnson had run a major cocaine ring. Trump groped around until he conjured up an assertion that if his notional death penalty for drug dealers had existed, Johnson would never have dealt drugs. Problem solved.

And so it went, with every answer either a retreat into magical thinking or chaff bursts of jarring nonsequiturs. Was Vladimir Putin wrong to invade Ukraine? If Trump had been president, Putin would never have done it. How would a Trump administration have handled the Chinese spy balloon? If Trump had been president, China would never have sent the balloon. Would Trump go to war over Taiwan? He’s a great dealmaker, he makes deals. What about his actions on January 6? Lawyers tell him his speech was perfect; also, Maxine Waters is bad.

Trump said all of this while showcasing the trademark tells—including nervous (and distracting) sniffling and verbal hiccups such as “Are you ready?”—that signal when he is tense and flustered. And perhaps he was more than flustered; perhaps his trip to a federal courtroom in Miami has finally induced a fear that he could face real consequences for his actions. His former chief of staff John Kelly thinks so, saying recently that he believes Trump is “scared shitless.” That would explain a lot about Trump’s defensiveness during the Fox interview.

[David A. Graham: This indictment is different]

And Trump may have yet more reason to worry, because the burble of sentence fragments he unloaded on Baier could land him in still deeper trouble. In a potentially important moment, Baier pressed Trump about why he hadn’t simply returned the boxes of materials as the government demanded. Trump, after his ritual invocation of the Divine Right of Presidential Box Ownership, said that he’d wanted to return them but hadn’t had enough time to go through everything, so he didn’t know what was in them. Bad move: Trump had already gotten his lawyers to certify that he did, in fact, know what was in them—or, more accurately, to certify that nothing classified or sensitive remained. As some legal analysts quickly pointed out, including a former prosecutor named Chris Christie, this all sounds a lot like obstruction of justice.

After the discussion of Trump’s indictments, an awkward pause halted the conversation for a moment. Baier took a beat, looked more closely at Trump, and asked: “Are you worried about any of this?” Trump, too, paused—an unnatural moment of hesitancy for a man who seems always to be speaking without the need to take a breath. He did, in fact, seem worried, which is perhaps why Baier took the opening to ask the question.

The moment passed. Trump went back on the attack. And yet, his heart wasn’t in it. He may be tired; he may be distracted. But for now, Donald Trump seems, more than anything, to be afraid.