Following the collapse of the president's healthcare law, and with Trump hitting new lows in the latest popularity polls, academic and left-wing intellectual Noam Chomsky is calling for vigilance against possible "false flag" terrorist attacks that he claims would be staged in order to shore up political support for the president, and to strip Americans of their constitutional rights.

According to Chomsky, once voters will see Trump for the "con man" he is, and that his promises were "built on sand," Trump will go to extreme measures to rally support.

“I think that we shouldn’t put aside the possibility that there would be some kind of staged or alleged terrorist act, which can change the country instantly,” Chomsky said in an interview with AlterNet's Jan Frel.

In Chomsky's opinion, once things start to go wrong, Trump will have to find other targets to point the finger at, so he will say “‘Well, I’m sorry, I can’t bring your jobs back because these bad people are preventing it.’ And the typical scapegoating goes to vulnerable people: immigrants, terrorists, Muslims and elitists, whoever it may be. And that can turn out to be very ugly.”

As for accusations of Russian interference in the U.S. elections, Chomsky thinks "it's all just a joke." While not denying the possibility that there has been interference on the part of the Russian government, he says the very fact the U.S. is outraged would have "half the world cracking up in laughter."

In his opinion, "whatever the Russians may have been doing, let's take the most extreme charges, that barely registers in the balance against what the U.S. does constantly" around the world.

For Chomsky, the U.S. attitude on interference abroad can be summed up as "If we don’t like the election, you can just overthrow the country."

Currently, both the U.S. Senate and House of Representatives intelligence committees are investigating alleged Russian interference that brought President Donald Trump to power.

The CIA, FBI and the NSA meanwhile have all stated that they are confident Russian President Putin ordered a campaign of influence to denigrate Secretary Clinton during the elections.