The President of the United States continues to exhibit clear signs of consciousness of guilt and a festering fear of exposure. Donald Trump’s Twitter feed would make a fascinating psychiatric study exploring acute paranoia in political leaders. And on Thursday morning he posted some more of the evidence of his growing mental instability.

Trump’s latest Twitter tantrum was likely inspired by his senior strategic advisor, Sean Hannity. As the top Trump-fluffer on Fox News Hannity has already initiated a campaign to smear special prosecutor Robert Mueller with an new emphasis on this being the one year anniversary of his appointment (as if that had any relevance to anything). Hannity and Trump are so cognitively aligned that they are now – as Stephen Colbert said – finishing each other’s prison sentences. And the familiar rhetoric of “fake news” and “witch hunt” flow from both of them as if in harmony. So early Thursday morning Trump posts this tedious gripe:

Congratulations America, we are now into the second year of the greatest Witch Hunt in American History…and there is still No Collusion and No Obstruction. The only Collusion was that done by Democrats who were unable to win an Election despite the spending of far more money!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 17, 2018

So now Trump is blaming America for investigating his unsavory connections to Russia and his unlawful attempts to cover it up. And he continues to bleat out impotent declarations that there has been no collusion despite all of the evidence that is known, and even more that Mueller surely has but is not yet ready to disclose. And if that weren’t enough, Trump has also adopted the wingnut conspiracy theory that Obama planted a spy in his presidential campaign.

Wow, word seems to be coming out that the Obama FBI “SPIED ON THE TRUMP CAMPAIGN WITH AN EMBEDDED INFORMANT.” Andrew McCarthy says, “There’s probably no doubt that they had at least one confidential informant in the campaign.” If so, this is bigger than Watergate!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 17, 2018

The “word” to which Trump is referring is a badly misinterpreted analysis by ultra-rightist Andrew McCarthy of the conservative National Review. McCarthy took a segment of testimony from Glenn Simpson of Fusion GPS, who said that Christopher Steele (of the Steele Dossier fame) believed the FBI had a source within the Trump campaign. To McCarthy, and much of the Trump mediaverse, that got magnified in their imaginations as a spy scandal.

But there is a big difference between a spy and a source. There is absolutely no hint of evidence that the FBI planted an agent (i.e. spy) in the Trump campaign. But there very well might have been a Trump associate (i.e. source) who was disgusted by his activities and informed law enforcement, as any patriotic American would do.

The fact that Trump keeps posting tweets that only exacerbate the appearance of his guilt is proof that he’s consumed with fear and is frantically trying to convince his deplorable disciples that it’s all a big frame-up. That may work on his cult followers, but the rest of the country – and world – only sees a pathetic wretch who seems to know deep inside that he’s going down hard.

How Fox News Deceives and Controls Their Flock:
Fox Nation vs. Reality: The Fox News Cult of Ignorance.
Available now at Amazon.

Trump has his surrogates fanning out across the airwaves to insist that the investigation be halted. Chief among them is his TV lawyer Rudy Giuliani, who is the best thing that ever happened in this affair – for the Democrats. The relentless demands that Mueller quit ignores the fact that that his investigation has already produced dozens of indictments and five guilty pleas. Trump and Company want it stopped because they know that his time is coming soon. And he’s right.