President Donald Trump and Attorney General Todd Blanche are treating congressional scrutiny that has not yet happened as though it were a criminal assault. Their reaction does more than protest an incoming Democratic oversight agenda because it advertises palpable panic before the first hearing or subpoena.

Bill Clinton, George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Trump share a familiar modern political experience. Each won two White House terms, began with Congress led by his own party, later served as that party lost the House and Senate, and faced opposition lawmakers eager to investigate after gaining committee gavels and subpoena power.

Clinton, Bush and Obama prepared for those investigations in a straightforward fashion. They operated from the obvious assumption that congressional oversight would happen whether the White House welcomed it or not.

Trump has chosen a far more frantic path. On Saturday afternoon, he responded to oversight that has not begun with a furious post on his social media platform, attacking Democrats and portraying anticipated investigations as an illegal campaign against Republicans.

“This is extortion at the highest level, and they should be held accountable for this,” Trump declared. He also accused Democrats of threatening Republican donors with imprisonment merely because they support the party.

The president followed those accusations with an order directed at federal law enforcement. “By copy of this statement, I am ordering the Department of Justice to look into this criminal act, immediately!” he wrote.

An hour later, Trump returned with another post. “The threats being made by the Democrat [ sic ] Party against innocent Republican Donors and Party Members are absolutely unprecedented, and totally illegal. … These SLEAZEBAGS should go to jail for what they are doing.”

Most of the claims were hysterical nonsense. The incoming Democratic majority is planning an aggressive oversight agenda involving congressional investigations, hearings and many subpoenas, but such scrutiny is a routine feature of divided government rather than the mysterious criminal conspiracy Trump described.

The revealing part was not merely Trump’s familiar online fury. It was his apparent inability, or unwillingness, to distinguish between lawmakers exercising oversight authority and criminals carrying out extortion.

Trump could have calmly maintained that investigators would find no wrongdoing within his administration. Instead, he labeled congressional oversight “illegal,” compared official inquiries to extortion and demanded criminal investigations of people preparing to scrutinize credible allegations involving the White House.

That response makes the president’s anxiety difficult to miss. His message was not that the administration had nothing to hide, but that those asking unwanted questions should themselves face investigation and imprisonment.

Attorney General Todd Blanche could have declined to amplify the president’s strange demands. Instead, he appeared Sunday morning on CNN’s “State of the Union” and gave credence to the premise that congressional leaders conducting oversight might be criminally prosecuted.

“What we‘ve seen over the past several days and even over the past several weeks are outright threats,” Blanche said, without identifying anything specific. When asked whether he considered those supposed threats criminal, he replied, “It depends on what’s said. So yes, there could be.”

That answer left the attorney general open to prosecuting members of Congress, or at least attempting to prosecute them, for pursuing questions the administration and its political allies would rather not answer. It also closely tracked Trump’s framing of oversight as “weaponization and lawfare.”

The sequence could hardly be clearer. Trump attacked future congressional scrutiny as criminal, ordered the Justice Department to investigate and imprison his political adversaries, and then watched as the attorney general publicly suggested that prosecutions might indeed be possible.

Congressional investigations have not yet started, but the president and attorney general are already acting as though oversight itself is intolerable. In trying to intimidate investigators before their work begins, both men have made their alarm impossible to conceal.

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