What did Donald Trump do today?

He did what he always does when he gets in trouble.

To all appearances, Trump did nothing today but golf and tweet. The day's 20 tweets and retweets—an increasingly typical day's "work" for Trump—give some sense of Trump's anxiety, and perhaps his evolving strategy, over the metastasizing whistleblower scandal. 

Trump's emerging theme with Biden seems to be to insist that it was somehow Biden, and not Trump himself, who attempted to extort the government of Ukraine for his own political gain. Trying to smear opponents with things that he himself is known or suspected to have done has been his default political strategy. Among many other example's, he's said that Hillary Clinton was a misogynist and a bigot who sought Russia's help to influence the election, ran a crooked charity, was too close to the Saudis, and was mentally unstable and too infirm to be president. He's also said that President Obama's academic degrees were fake, that he illegally profited from the presidency, and that he played too much golf.

Trump repeatedly insisted that he was the innocent victim of a smear campaign undertaken by a secret conspiracy of the Democratic party, the entire news media, and his own government.

What is so bad about this?

• Trying to deflect attention from your own acts doesn't change them.

• Past a certain point, psychological projection becomes a sign of mental illness.

• The same thing is true of thinking that everyone is conspiring against you.