'This is embarrassing.'

Trump supporters I know pooh-pooh my concerns- and those of many Americans- over the president's mental health. Narcissism and pathological lying are manifest symptoms one does not need a degree in psychology to notice in Mr. Trump's behavior. But that's not the most worrisome issue.

Much of what Mr. Trump says is not only contrary to fact but downright irrational. But that does not stop the most gullible among his supporters from believing every word he says, however crazy.  Some claim that he's simply engaging in over-the-top rhetoric and exaggeration.  I'm not sure his well-established habit of making ludicrous charges, unsupported by any evidence whatsoever, against anyone he finds to be a useful target can be that easily excused or defended But there's a more frightening possibility: what if he actually believes the crazy things he says?

What if he's actively delusional? 

The thought that the President of the United States might be literally paranoid is frightening. But what is even more frightening is the number of people who really would, as he once bragged, continue to support him even if he committed murder in broad daylight on Fifth Avenue in New York. His attempts to discredit the FBI and the CIA- the intelligence agencies of our own government- for partisan political reasons have been disgraceful, and a frightening number of Americans were willing to take the word of a hostile foreign government over that of our own intelligence agencies because our own president says so.

Pity our poor, picked-on president whom everybody is out to get. Even the FBI!

And now, Mr. Trump- exploiting the alt-right's paranoia about a "Deep State" consisting of entrenched bureaucrats, officials, and institutions which supposedly hold the real power in America and are not answerable to the constitutionally-established authorities- has gone one step further in his partisan crusade against the FBI. Tinfoil has its legitimate uses, but presidential headgear is not one of them!

He is claiming that the FBI- which admittedly had informants on his campaign staff investigating credible (and subsequently confirmed) suspicions of illegal activity involving contact with unfriendly foreign governments- instead had "spies" working on behalf of the "Deep State" and the Democrats!

As is usually the case with the president's wild accusations, he has offered no evidence of such motivations whatsoever. But then, his supporters don't require evidence. It's enough that he makes a claim, however absurd and however wild and unsubstantiated. Then, too, a large part of his base is certainly paranoid, whether to the point of being clinically psychotic or not.

Former Trump campaign official A.J. Delgato has tweeted a straightforward response to Mr. Trump's latest wild, irresponsible rant. "Are we really going w (sic) this??," she asks. "That Obama put a spy inside the Trump campaign, to frame Trump? Srsly (sic)? Not sure if it’s IQ, ethics, or simple common sense but I cant (sic). This is embarrassing."

The response: Trump supporters demanding to know whether she had any connection to the Obama administration before joining the Trump campaign and wondering why she would even doubt such a bizarre and unlikely accusation without a shred of evidence to support it.

Sigh.

But there's another explanation for the president's bizarre behavior and wild accusations more disturbing even than presidential paranoia. It's a standard tactic of authoritarians to try to discredit not only the media but anyone else capable of offering a narrative on events they cannot control. If Mr. Trump is consciously doing so in the case of the media and the American intelligence community- and I think that's the most likely hypothesis of all-  he's actively working to undermine our institutions for the sake of consolidating his grasp on power. And in many ways, that's at least as frightening as his emotional instability and often shaky contact with reality.

Not that anyone who was paying attention as early as last year's primaries couldn't have expected him to do precisely that. Mr. Trump's authoritarianism was his strongest appeal to his base last year. It probably still is what appeals to his hard-core supporters the most. His encouragement of violence against peaceful demonstrators at his rallies (even to the point of promising to pay the legal fees of anyone who beat them up), his repeated promise to disregard the First Amendment and change the law so that the authors "purposely false" news stories (i.e., those which put him in a bad light), his pattern of scapegoating minorities and glorifying racist neo-fascists like former Arizona sheriff and present Senate candidate Joe Arpaio (whom he pardoned deepite Arpaio's conviction for abusing minority prisoners in his charge), paint a picture that can't help but be frightening to anyone who values our American way of life and is not in willful denial.

And the number of people who are in either denial or sympathy with Trumpist authoritarianism is the most frightening thing of all. Nutty right-wing groups and individuals are crawling out from underneath rocks where they have been confined for decades and gaining credibility they simply do not deserve because their rhetoric is so closely in sync with that of a sitting president. The reprehensible has been wrapped in a cloak of respectability by the values of the man who was elected by a gullible minority of Americans last year, though and admittedly opposed by a Democrat who was just as bad, only in different ways.

But I have a feeling that Mr. Trump's vendetta against the FBI will be his undoing. Most Americans are not crazy. Most Americans believe in fair play and require actual evidence of wrongdoing before they will believe wild and irresponsible charges about a venerable institution of American law enforcement with a long and honorable history of protecting the very freedoms Mr. Trump and his supporters seem to value so little.

I believed last year that in what seemed to me to be the unlikely event that he was elected,  Mr. Trump would do himself in. He has played fast and loose with the law his entire adult life, and as accomplished a con man as he is, he is operating in a spotlight that simply does hot and too bright not to be his undoing. I still do. His claim of responsibility for favorable economic trends which began under his predecessor and because of his predecessor's policies aren't selling all that well, and his popularity rating is abysmal.

We are not a nation of fools. Donald Trump may well remain in office long enough to be defeated in 2020- that is, if the Democrats don't nominate somebody just as off the wall, if not more so. And that is by no means a foregone conclusion.

But my money is still on resignation under fire or outright impeachment. I don't think even Donald Trump is an accomplished enough con man to get away with this for a full four years. And even more, I don't think that the American people are gullible enough, or ethically compromised enough, to let him.