The high-energy comedian says he knows exactly how to take down the president. Now, if he could only get his hands on one little tape.

BEVERLY HILLS, Calif.—The secret of every Donald Trump conspiracy theory—the ones he pushes and the ones he rails against—is that he's made them all seem real, all seem possible. Every day is a race between the absurd and the unprecedented. Things that never would have been believable are obviously true. Easily debunked lies are insisted on as fact. People who would have been ignored or forgotten about or never paid attention to in the first place are bizarre kind of stars now.

That's the upside-down world where Tom Arnold lives, and the former Roseanne spouse is self-aware enough to appreciate the oddity of his role in the freak show that politics has become. "Donald Trump is a D-list f---ing president, and his enemies are D-list, like Tom Arnold," he says.

Right now, the writer-comedian-actor is working on his upcoming Viceland show, "The Hunt for the Trump Tapes," channeling his minor celebrity into already landing conversations with Anthony Scaramucci, Felix Sater and Michael Cohen, and made him a regular of cable news shows as he's stumbled into manic relevance. Like, why was he with Cohen, even as the Trump lawyer contemplates turning on his old boss? What was a man who once said he'd take a bullet for the president doing with a man who has positioned himself as the nexus of all the Trump hate in Hollywood? And just what, exactly, does Tom Arnold think he's doing?

"My goal is for Donald Trump to resign before he really destroys—you know, to keep pressure on him. And I think that you will see that, as shocking as it is, that I am keeping pressure on him. It makes no sense that I, what Tom Arnold does, would be keeping pressure—that Tom Arnold taking a selfie with Michael Cohen in the stupid lobby of the Regency would be," Arnold told me in an interview for the latest episode of POLITICO's Off Message podcast, recorded as Cohen was preparing to do his own interview with George Stephanopoulos teasing that he'd cooperate with federal prosecutors.