The 98-page indictment handed down by a Georgia grand jury makes clear that former President Donald Trump could have saved himself, his friends, and the nation a lot of trouble if he’d done one of two things.

Either he should have listened to his lawyers … or, if his legal team told him it was OK to do what he was doing, he should have hired better lawyers.

Most of the attention devoted to Trump’s attempts to overturn the results of the 2020 presidential election has been focused on how amoral, anti-democratic and un-American the former president’s desperate maneuvers were.

Not enough notice has been directed at just how plain dumb they were. Not only did they have little chance of ever succeeding, but any competent lawyer could have told Trump and his team much of what they were doing all but guaranteed they were going to be caught.

These Georgia indictments are a perfect example.

Part of the reason Trump must insist, over and over and over again, that his infamous phone conversation with Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger was “perfect” is that he can’t possibly lie and say it never happened. Trump can’t deny that he tried to lean on Raffensperger to illegally manufacture the votes necessary for him to win Georgia.

That’s because the secretary of state recorded the then-president trying to coerce Raffensperger into breaking the law.

Now, if Trump had listened to any competent criminal attorney, that lawyer would have told him not to try to pressure any elected official to violate his oath of office and the law. That lawyer also likely would have told him that, if Trump was determined to do something so self-destructive, not to be so stupid as to do so over the phone in a state where the law requires only one party to consent to have a conversation recorded.

But Trp either didn’t have any competent criminal lawyers around him—or, if he did, he chose not to listen to them.

Either way, he ended up leaving behind a recording that makes Donald Trump one of the most damaging witnesses against … Donald Trump. While Trump was on the phone, he was fashioning a noose Georgia law enforcement officials could use to hang him—and he wasn’t even aware he was doing it.

Not smart.

Just as dumb is the fact that he opted to play these games in Georgia, a state in which his power to protect his allies should they refuse to help the prosecution is nonexistent, even if he is elected president again.

Because this indictment focuses on Trump and his alleged co-conspirators’ violations of state law, he can’t issue pardons even if he returns to the Oval Office.

Worse—from the former president’s perspective, that is—is that even if he makes up with Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp, a fellow Republican with whom Trump has feuded, or sees some other Republican move into the governor’s office, it won’t change things. Georgia is one of the few states in the union in which the governor does not have the authority to issue pardons.

Again, a competent lawyer likely would have pointed that out to Trump—and encouraged him not to play a game of chicken in a state where the penal code never swerves.

Instead, Trump relied on Rudy Giuliani and Sydney Powell, both of whom seem to write their briefs in Silly Putty and look to Saturday morning cartoons for their legal arguments. Both now are under indictment with Trump as a co-conspirator.

Part of the reason the former president didn’t have strong legal counsel is that he has a long history of not paying his lawyers. For that reason, many good firms and effective attorneys refused and continue to refuse to work with him.

Thus, Trump continues running into trouble with the law, often in ways that are almost numbingly dumb and therefore would have been easily avoidable.

The late and much-missed Texas newspaper columnist Molly Ivins had a marvelous phrase she used to describe rodeo-clown-style political shenanigans.

She said there is stupidity—and then there is felony-level stupidity.

It’s almost as if she coined the phrase with Donald Trump in mind.