Special counsel Robert Mueller, for all his secret knowledge of the Russia investigation, is at a critical disadvantage to Donald Trump. While Mueller quietly builds what appears to be a legal case against members of the president’s campaign, Trump is already fighting any potential charges in the only arena where they will truly matter: the media. As Trump well knows, the Department of Justice is unlikely to indict a sitting president. Instead, the special counsel’s report will almost certainly become the basis for articles of impeachment, a political drama that will play out in Congress rather than a courtroom. Trump, with his now daily deluge of tweets disparaging the F.B.I. and the Russia investigation, has secured a major head start in the battle for public opinion. The president’s personal lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, admitted as much on Sunday, telling CNN’s Dana Bash, “it is for public opinion, because eventually the decision here is going to be impeach, not impeach.” Lawmakers in Congress, he added, “are going to be informed a lot by their constituents. And so our jury is—as it should be—is the American people. And the American people, yes, are Republicans, largely, independents, pretty substantially, and even some Democrats now question the legitimacy of [the investigation].”

It’s hard to know how deeply Trump believes his own conspiracy theories about the F.B.I.’s use of an informant to investigate Russian infiltration. As my colleague Gabriel Sherman reported, Trump appears to share in the delusion—now widespread among his allies—that anti-Trump forces within the bureau entrapped his advisers and may even have planted evidence of Russia collusion as an “insurance policy” against his presidency. According to one administration official, the paranoia is so pervasive that people in the West Wing fear there may be additional informants inside the White House. The disinformation loop between Trump and Fox News has been internalized by both parties. Yet there is also abundant evidence that the content of the president’s increasingly inflammatory tweets, if not their manic style, is carefully calculated to poison the jury pool that Giuliani described. Last week, the Associated Press reported that Trump had told an associate he wanted to brand the F.B.I. informant as a “spy,” because he believed “the more nefarious term would resonate more in the media and with the public.” On Monday, The New York Times reported that while Trump had previously resisted using the term “deep state” because “he believed it made him look too much like a crank,” he began using it in November, two aides said, after he “saw that it played well in the conservative news media.”

The public, as Trump surely intuits, is primed for his messaging. According to a recent Monmouth University poll, more than half of Americans are worried about the government monitoring their activities or invading their privacy, and 8 in 10 believe the government is spying on them or their fellow citizens. While only about 13 percent are familiar with the term “deep state,” when the pollsters described the group as “unelected government and military officials who secretly manipulate or direct national policy,” about 3 in 4 said they believe that such a cabal exists. Trump’s attacks are particularly resonant with conservatives: support for the F.B.I. among Republicans—previously the self-identified “law-and-order” party—has collapsed over the past year. Only 54 percent of Americans now say Mueller’s probe should continue, a drop of 6 points since March. A YouGov survey this month found that a majority of Republicans believe the F.B.I. and the Justice Department are actually trying to frame the president.

Trump’s escalating attacks on the special counsel mark a significant departure from the more accommodating stance he maintained for much of the past year, under the guidance of his former legal team, including John Dowd and Ty Cobb. (“The president is confident based on the lack of evidence of any wrongdoing that he’ll be treated appropriately by the special counsel and ideally in the near future,” Cobb told CNN in December, in a characteristically congenial statement.) Dowd resigned in March, amid disagreements over Trump’s growing impatience with that strategy. Giuliani joined the team in April, and Cobb was replaced in May by attorney Emmet Flood, a specialist in impeachment proceedings. Giuliani himself initially stuck to the Dowd-Cobb playbook, saying that Trump was eager to cooperate and that he expected Mueller would conclude his inquiry in “a week or two.” But his position on the scope of the inquiry shifted after a copy of the questions Mueller planned to ask Trump in an interview was leaked to the press (potentially from the president’s legal team). “We are not going to sit [Trump] down [for an interview] if this is a trap for perjury,” Giuliani recently told Fox News. He has said that “the truth is relative,” and he worries that Mueller’s team “may have a different version of the truth than we do.”