President Donald Trump’s administration — presently about as popular as a sweaty handshake — responds to bad news with just enough nonsense to make sane people feel like balsa wood boats in a tempest of bunk.

Plagued by a scandal over connections between Russians and members of his campaign, Trump has done everything possible to keep the issue on the front burner, routinely tweeting about the whole mess (FAKE NEWS!), accusing (sans evidence, of course) then-President Barack Obama of illegally wiretapping Trump Tower and generally adding to the billowing clouds of smoke that suggest a fire is burning somewhere.

Now Trump and the far-right media absurd-o-sphere have decided the best way to prove something like a baseless, evidence-free claim of illegal wiretapping is with baseless, evidence-free finger-pointing. And the curiously small, orange finger points to former National Security Adviser Susan Rice.

You see, the issue here is not the intelligence community’s certainty that Russia interfered with the 2016 presidential election. It’s not the growing list of people in Trump’s orbit who we now know had contact with various Russians before and after the election. It’s not the firing of Trump’s National Security Adviser Michael Flynn for lying about contacts with Russia or Flynn’s request for immunity in exchange for testifying before the House and Senate intelligence committees.

It’s Susan Rice and the nefarious-sounding term “unmasking.”

Here’s a synopsis: When U.S. intelligence agencies are surveilling foreign individuals, be they ambassadors or suspected spies, Americans are routinely swept up in the surveillance. The identities of the Americans are kept out of intelligence reports. But they can be unmasked by intelligence officials if it’s deemed relevant to an investigation or necessary to understand the context of a surveilled conversation.

That doesn’t mean those names are shared with the public, or even shared widely among intelligence officials. But requests to unmask unnamed Americans in foreign surveillance reports are not uncommon, and Rice would’ve been acting fully within her capacity as national security adviser to make such requests.

Most importantly, those requests would have to be approved by intelligence officials before Rice could see anything. That keeps the decision-making on the investigative side to protect against political shenanigans.

Based on what we know, Rice did nothing wrong and, in fact, was doing her job by scrutinizing Russian surveillance at a time when the intelligence community was investigating Russian interference with an election.

But the screeching headlines on Breitbart and other children’s websites have made it sound like Rice is the second coming of Richard Nixon. And so, Americans are drawn deeper into the unfolding Russian scandal, and Trump apparently doesn’t understand focusing on Rice’s unmasking requests only suggests that the story he claims is fake may well be very, very real.

If Rice was trying to unmask suspected members of Trump’s campaign swept up in surveillance of agents of a foreign adversary, a logical question might be: Why were so many members of Trump’s campaign talking to surveilled agents of a foreign adversary?

The accusations against Rice should be investigated, but as with the senseless wiretapping claim that brought us to this point, they’re a ham-handed attempt to distract from the broader Russian scandal.

If you know your zipper is down, you don’t try to get people to ignore it by talking incessantly about zippers.

The administration’s response to Tuesday’s horrifying chemical attack on innocent civilians in Syria followed a similar nonsensical path.

A statement from the president read: “Today’s chemical attack in Syria against innocent people, including women and children, is reprehensible and cannot be ignored by the civilized world. These heinous actions by the Bashar al-Assad regime are a consequence of the past administration’s weakness and irresolution. President Obama said in 2012 that he would establish a ‘red line’ against the use of chemical weapons and then did nothing.”

Looking past the utter tastelessness of using the slaughter of innocents — including children — to take a political jab at a former president, Trump’s words are not entirely wrong. The Obama administration and the rest of the world didn’t do enough to stand up to Assad’s brutality.

But the problem with Trump’s comment now is that when Obama was considering military action against Syria in 2013, a private citizen named Donald Trump was vociferously encouraging Obama to stand down.

Trump sent a slew of tweets on the subject, writing things like “What I am saying is stay out of Syria”; “Do NOT attack Syria.”; “Stay out of Syria!”

And just days before Tuesday’s attack, Trump’s ambassador to the United Nations, Nikki Haley, and his secretary of state, Rex Tillerson, both made clear that Assad is not a priority of the United States.

“Are we going to sit there and focus on getting him out?” Haley asked. “No.”

And Tillerson said Assad’s fate “will be decided by the Syrian people.”

So Trump says the chemical attack is Obama’s fault because he wouldn’t go after Syria back when Trump was telling him not to go after Syria. And the former president was too weak on Assad so the new president plans to get tougher by not focusing on Assad.

Also, Trump is so concerned with the humanitarian crisis in Syria that he wants to block all Syrian refugees from entering the United States. And Syria’s brutal regime, the one we plan to ignore, is supported by — wait for it, because it’s really fantastic — Russia!

The Trumpian bunk tempest shows no signs of letting up.

Hold fast to your boats, people. Storms like this can tear your sanity apart.

Rex Huppke is a columnist for the Chicago Tribune. Readers may email him at rhuppke@chicagotribune.com