QUITE often, the peddling of a conspiracy theory is a form of confession: a window into how a suspicious mind thinks that the world works. President Donald Trump says that federal probes into Russian attacks on the presidential election of 2016 are a “hoax” confected by Democrats to explain Hillary Clinton’s defeat, and are now kept alive by what he calls the “Deep State Justice Department”.

These are heady days for believers in that plot. On January 29th a Trump bogey-man, the deputy director of the FBI, Andrew McCabe, abruptly quit his post and went on leave pending his formal retirement. Mr McCabe’s wife, the conspiracy-minded note, is a Democrat who ran unsuccessfully in 2015 for a state Senate seat in Virginia, helped by six-figure campaign contributions from a close Clinton ally. Incredibly, at least to Mr Trump and his supporters, in early 2016 Mr McCabe was allowed to oversee a probe into Mrs Clinton’s improper handling of secret government e-mails on a private computer server when she was secretary of state.

Mr McCabe’s defenders note, in vain, that he flagged up his wife’s candidacy and was cleared of a conflict of interest. His critics feel vindicated by press reports that an internal review into the Clinton e-mail investigation, led by the Justice Department’s inspector-general, Michael Horowitz, has zeroed in on decisions made by Mr McCabe which some colleagues saw as politicised. Even before that internal review is published, Mr McCabe’s exit must delight Mr Trump. The president spent months rubbishing the FBI deputy head on Twitter, demanding to know why his attorney-general, Jeff Sessions, had not removed him. Mr Trump attacked Mr McCabe as both a Clinton stooge and as a friend of James Comey, the FBI director he fired in May 2017, after Mr Comey rebuffed a presidential demand to swear loyalty.

Among Republicans, and on the Fox News TV shows that the president devours for hours each week, Mr McCabe is rivalled in infamy by two other senior officials at the FBI, Peter Strzok and Lisa Page. Mr Strzok was removed from the Russia investigation being run by Robert Mueller, the special counsel, after they were found to have exchanged text messages expressing disdain for then-Candidate Trump (“an utter idiot”) and apparently arguing—at a time when opinion polls suggested that Mrs Clinton would win easily—that a probe into alleged collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign, was a vital “insurance policy”. Mr Trump has called those text exchanges “treasonous”. A Republican senator, Ron Johnson of Wisconsin, fulminated about other Strzok-Page texts that talked about a “secret society” before conceding that the texts may have been a joke.

If the din of claims and counter-claims seems confusing, here is one bleak observation. Mr Trump seems unable to believe that public servants are capable of putting country ahead of personal beliefs or interests. The president seems to divide aides into two groups: those loyal to their masters, and ingrates. In December Mr Trump shared with the New York Times his belief that Eric Holder, attorney-general for most of Barack Obama’s time in office, “totally protected” his president from serious scandals, and added: “I’ll be honest, I have great respect for that.”

Mr Trump’s worldview may be further confirmed by a memo commissioned by a loyalist who chairs the House Intelligence Committee, Representative Devin Nunes of California. Republican committee members voted to make the memo public against the urging of the FBI, which expressed “grave concerns about the material omissions of fact that fundamentally impact the memo’s accuracy’’. The Nunes memo reportedly sketches out a case that officials, including the deputy attorney-general, Rod Rosenstein, misled a secret court, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court, when seeking a warrant to spy on Carter Page, a former Trump campaign associate. Specifically, it contends that the government did not spell out that evidence against Mr Page came from a dossier drawn up by Christopher Steele, a former British spy, with funding from Democrats and the Clinton campaign.

Sean Hannity, a Trump cheerleader on Fox News, has called the memo proof that Mr Mueller “and his band of Democratic witch-hunters” should be disbanded and that Mr Rosenstein, who oversees Mr Mueller, should be fired. Paul Ryan, the Republican House Speaker, is more squeamish. He wants possible FBI “malfeasance” investigated, while claiming that the Nunes memo is “completely separate” from the Mueller inquiry. If that puzzles some, Mr Trump need not care. For him, sowing distrust and confusion is a win.