Over the course of the last few months, Donald Trump has taken the public on a roller- coaster ride of responses to allegations of collusion between his campaign and Russia. Throughout the spring, the president repeatedly tweeted that there was “no evidence” that he had colluded with the Kremlin, calling the “Russia-Trump collusion story“ a “total hoax,” a “witch hunt,” a “taxpayer-funded charade” and “FAKE NEWS” “fabricated by Dems as an excuse for having lost the election.” Over the last several days, however, as F.B.I. special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation continues to expand, Trump has begun floating a new set of talking points about “collusion” that seek to change the conversation entirely.

“Since the Obama Administration was told way before the 2016 Election that the Russians were meddling, why no action? Focus on them, not T!” he tweeted Saturday, in the wake of a bombshell Washington Post report that documented how Barack Obama struggled to respond to Russia’s 2016 cyberattacks aimed at influencing the campaign to help elect Trump. Fox News was primed to turn its attention to the previous administration, which provided conservatives with a clever bit of counterprogramming to the hysteria on the left. “Obama Administration official said they ‘choked’ when it came to acting on Russian meddling of election,” he added. “They didn't want to hurt Hillary?”

The terms of the debate over “collusion” continued to shift on Sunday . . .

. . . And again on Monday, as Trump perfected his argument that it was actually Obama who had “colluded” with the Russians by not mentioning an investigation into possible election meddling because he wanted Hillary Clinton to win. He also demanded an apology:

Obama’s botched response to Russian meddling is indeed confounding, especially if his administration’s decision to remain quiet was motivated by a desire not to appear partisan. But Trump, who has repeatedly refused to acknowledge Russian hacking and has continually sought better relations with Moscow, is clearly operating in bad faith. And he’s using the confusion surrounding the latest revelations about Obama’s policy toward Russia to muddy the conversation about his campaign’s own alleged misdeeds. On Tuesday, amid a flurry of excited tweets linking to Fox News and endorsing a Fox News host’s new book, the president retweeted a link to a video of conservative radio host Mark Levin arguing that it was Obama, not Trump, who had colluded. “[Obama] colluded to cover this up, to keep it from the American people,” Levin said Monday night on Sean Hannity’s show, pushing the definition of collusion into flimsy legal territory. “Now we have collusion,” he added. “Democrats should be excited.”

Trump quickly followed it up by linking to Hannity’s own rant from the night before, in which the Fox News host essentially accused everyone of collusion except the president. “The real fault for Russia’s election interference now falls—guess what?—at the feet of former President Obama,” Hannity said in his opening monologue. “The real crimes were committed, in fact, by Hillary Clinton. The real obstructer of justice is the former attorney general, Loretta Lynch. . . . And the real corrupt collusion is the relationship between the former F.B.I. director, James Comey, and . . . the special counsel Robert Mueller.”

To recap, we’ve gone from Trump claiming the notion of Russian interference was a hoax to it being very real and Obama being the true colluder. What, if anything, this lays the groundwork for is unclear. But the president is obviously expanding the definition of collusion beyond recognition, even as he floats a half-dozen other targets for Republicans—and Republican lawmakers running the House and Senate intelligence committees—to latch onto. Mueller presumably won’t be distracted. But Trump’s cheerleaders, on Fox News and elsewhere, will be happy with the new set of talking points.