The president of the United States is a certified conspiracy theorist who has suggested that Justice Antonin Scalia may have been murdered, that millions of illegal votes were cast in 2016 and that Democrats inflated the death count from Hurricane Maria to make him look bad. So it’s no surprise that, to save himself from possible impeachment and prosecution, he spins crazy conspiracy theories to impugn his foes. What is more confounding and dismaying is that so many Republicans and “conservatives” have been so eager to join him in Cloud Cuckoo-Land even though their theories keep exploding like kernels in the popcorn popper.

Remember when Trump claimed that President Barack Obama “had my “wires tapped” in Trump Tower”? When he said that special counsel Robert S. Mueller III was investigating him because he was angry about a fee dispute at Trump National Golf Club? When he claimed that texts sent between FBI agent Peter Strzok and his girlfriend, Lisa Page, were evidence not only of anti-Trump bias but of “treason”? When he charged that the FBI had infiltrated his campaign with a “spy” to gather political dirt? When he supported Rep. Devin Nunes (R-Calif.) in claiming that the FBI had obtained a surveillance warrant for Trump adviser Carter Page based solely on a dossier compiled by British ex-spy Christopher Steele without telling the judges that Steele had been hired by political opponents?

Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Pop. Each of these conspiracy theories is no more. It turns out that no one tapped Trump Tower. That there is zero evidence of Mueller being angry over golf course fees, much less misusing his authority to gain revenge. That Strzok and Page did not conspire against Trump. That the FBI had not infiltrated the campaign but had spoken with an informant on its outskirts to learn about Russian infiltration. And that the FBI investigation into Trump-Kremlin links was prompted not by the Steele dossier but by the admission of a Trump adviser to an Australian diplomat that the Russians had dirt on Hillary Clinton.