The “conspiracy” against Donald Trump now includes just about everyone

| 3:15 pm EDT August 31, 2018
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Remember back when Donald Trump used to try to scapegoat one individual or entity at a time? It was still absurd on its face, for anyone who was keeping track, or doing any thinking. But by keeping his false accusations isolated to one target in any given news cycle, Trump at least managed to keep up the faint appearance of plausibility in the eyes of those who weren’t paying much attention. Those days are gone. Trump is now fending off so much trouble on so many fronts, all at once, he can no longer afford to be picky about his targets.

Based on Donald Trump’s latest claims, this is now his official version of events: literally everyone in the FBI and the U.S. intelligence community was conspiring with Hillary Clinton during the election, even though most of them were Republicans who hated Hillary. Every major news outlet (except Fox) was also conspiring against him during the election, and is continuing to conspire against him to this day. Fifteen months ago NBC News falsified an interview with him in order to create the appearance that he’d confessed to a felony, but he never bothered to call them out on it until today.

In other words, in Donald Trump’s view, literally everyone is now conspiring against him about literally everything. Nice try, but this is not an argument that you can sell to people who don’t wear tinfoil hats. The average moderate nonpartisan American sitting at home may never know or care about the particulars of which FBI agent was doing what behind the scenes, or which news outlet did what on its worst day. But these are the kind of folks who are never going to buy the notion that everyone is plotting against Trump for no apparent reason.

Donald Trump has never had a plausible argument to make when it comes to pinning his hundreds of felonies on various scapegoats. But as long as he targeted them one at at time, he was at least able to muddy the waters. Now that everything is coming at him at once, and he’s forced to accuse everyone of inexplicably plotting against him, he sounds like little more than a guy ranting on the sidewalk at passers-by who can’t wait to get away from him. This is no longer tenable for him.