The feverish tweets of President Donald Trump are now so familiar they’ve become background noise. Yet if we pay attention to the literal meaning of his words, they are often startling. Last Thursday, he tweeted:

Not surprisingly, the GREAT Men & Women of the FBI are starting to speak out against Comey, McCabe and all of the political corruption and poor leadership found within the top ranks of the FBI. Comey was a terrible and corrupt leader who inflicted great pain on the FBI! #SPYGATE — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 24, 2018

Trump is accusing “the top ranks” of the FBI of corruption, an outburst that would cause controversy for any other president but now barely rates a yawn. But Trump’s rhetoric is an important clue as to how he plans to steer his way through the scandals that plague his administration, particularly the slow-dripping revelations from special counsel Robert Mueller’s Russia inquiry.

“Trump’s language is getting darker and more ominous, suggesting the FBI’s activities during the 2016 elections were ‘bigger than Watergate,’ and yesterday claiming a ‘criminal deep state’ conspiracy to get him,” Mike Allen wrote in Axios. “We might be numb to so many attacks on so many groups so often that it obscures how President Trump has torched virtually every institution that could one day hold him accountable.”

Allen provided a daunting list of targets of Trump’s recent attacks: Mueller, the special counsel’s prosecutors, the media, the Justice Department, the FBI, the intelligence community, Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Deputy Attorney General Rod Rosenstein, New York state investigators and prosecutors, Democrats on intelligence committees, and unreliable GOP senators. The commonality of the targets is that they are all people or institutions that could check his power.

Trump’s strategy on tearing down institutions might well work, especially given the support he has among congressional Republicans. As journalist Charles Pierce argues in Esquire, “This president is willing to pull the temple down on his own head, and the Republicans are willing to compliment him on his renovation.”