In the real world, Donald Trump and his cohorts are sliding toward what would now seem to be inevitable criminal charges related to their attempted overthrow of the United States. Trump appears to be aware of this, as evidenced by his efforts at his latest rally to call for violence if he should be indicted. But following his own tradition, Trump’s public response to finding himself teetering on the cliff—again—is to get out that shovel and dig the hole deeper, wider, and more bizarre than anyone might have guessed.

On Sunday night, that included a public confession in which Trump insisted that Mike Pence had the authority to change the outcome of the 2020 election on his own. Trump then went on to criticize Pence explicitly for his failure to “overturn the election.”

On Tuesday, Trump carried this claim several illogical steps further. Trump is now attempting to flip the whole basis of the nation 180 degrees, insisting that anyone who attempted to stop his coup needs to be investigated. That includes wondering why the House Select Committee on Jan. 6 isn’t going after Mike Pence for failing to end democracy.

The text of the latest missive from Trump indicates that he hasn’t stopped frothing since he stepped on the stage in Texas.

In the last two such dispatches from Mar-a-Lago, Trump has maintained that efforts to clean up the Electoral Count Act are somehow “proof” that Pence had the authority to do as he pleased when it came to counting votes in the last presidential election. Trump doesn’t seem to take this to any kind of logical conclusions—such as wondering why Al Gore didn’t hand himself the election in 2000, or worrying that Kamala Harris might reverse a Republican win in 2024—because there’s nothing resembling logic in Trump’s statement.

The entire statement from Trump is so packed with lies, it’s almost admirable how it fits so many falsehoods in so little space. It’s the stale holiday fruitcake of statements, stuffed to overflowing with diced bits of lies.

In addition to falsely claiming that the election was filled with “fraud” and “irregularities,” Trump claims again that Pence could have altered the votes, or “sent them back” to Republican-controlled state legislatures. Then Trump squeezes in a false claim that Rep. Nancy Pelosi “is in charge of Capitol security.”  He even managed to get the name of the Electoral Count Act wrong.

But it’s the final sentence of this statement that sets the new marching orders for the most fervent (and fetid) of Trump’s supporters:

Beyond the torturing of both logic and English, Trump’s statement does a double backflip in rejecting responsibility for the failure to provide security on Jan. 6 and reversing the logic on Pence. According to Trump, Pence should be investigated for his failure to carry out the coup plot.

What Pence might say in response to having Trump declare him a traitor can be expected to be some form of “Trump is great.” After all, that’s been Pence’s consistent refrain since he got past that whole bit about Trump encouraging people to hang him, and moved on with the realization that the only future in the Republican Party is one that embraces Trump as god-king.

For other Republicans, expect this to become the bottom line. They’ve already moved through every variation from Jan. 6 was a horror, to a peaceful gathering of patriots, to a fully justified uprising, to a deep-state trap carried out by the FBI. Jumping straight into claims that failing to overturn the election is a crime, should be no challenge at all.