Gerald Herbert/AP Photo
Donald Trump arrives to speak at a campaign rally in Lake Charles, Louisiana, October 11, 2019.
“Forget the myths the media has created about the White House,” says Deep Throat in All the President’s Men. “Truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.” To anyone who has spent significant time in Washington, it could be an apt description of a hundred different scandals and screw-ups. In fact, it applies to Robert Mueller’s account of the Trump campaign’s relationship to Russia in 2016: It wasn’t that Trump, his family, and his aides didn’t want to collude, because they did. But what happened didn’t qualify as a criminal conspiracy only because they were too dumb and incompetent to organize one.
Yet to the president himself, everything anyone else does is a conspiracy, one mounted against him. He appears to sincerely believe at least some of it; perhaps it’s the product of a lifetime spent lying, cheating, and staying a step or two ahead of the law. So he brings to his political rhetoric a conspiratorial frame that he puts around every event, every action by his opponents, and even the ordinary functions of government.
While the Republican Party has long had an openness to conspiratorial thinking—they’re the ones who thought Bill Clinton murdered Vince Foster and Barack Obama was a foreign-born Manchurian candidate—Trump has put conspiracy-theorizing at the center of his political rhetoric to such an extraordinary degree that it now infects nearly the entire party, from the lowliest Fox News viewer to the highest elected official.
As Trump is now facing impeachment over the Ukraine scandal, we’re seeing how far he has pushed his party into the realm of tin foil-hattery. While it would be difficult to defend his behavior under any circumstances, his advocates have been rendered almost incoherent by their acceptance of Trump’s view of a world full of secret machinations.
As a parade of career diplomats and national-security professionals offers their testimony to the impeachment inquiry, it becomes more obvious all the time just how central Republican conspiracy-theorizing is to this scandal. Indeed, its origins lie there. While you surely know that Rudy Giuliani was pressuring Ukraine on Trump’s behalf to dig up dirt on Joe Biden, less attention has been paid to the second thing Rudy was seeking: Information that would validate an utterly banana-pants theory about the 2016 election.
This theory says that Russia never actually intervened in the election on Trump’s behalf. It never hacked into Democratic systems, then passed the emails it stole to Wikileaks so they could be released publicly to embarrass Hillary Clinton. No, the theory says, in fact the hacking was conducted by forces in Ukraine at the direction of Democrats themselves, with the help of a cybersecurity company called CrowdStrike. The whole thing was a massive false flag operation meant to ... well, it’s not entirely clear what they think it was meant to do, but embarrassing Russia seems to be the closest thing to a motivation they’ve come up with.
Even a few seconds of thought about this theory makes clear how inane it is (Democrats hacked themselves? Then released the embarrassing emails?). One of the weirder details is that there is supposedly a server from the DNC that was spirited away to Ukraine; if we could find it, the whole crime would be blown wide open. Among the people who believe this nonsense are the president of the United States (“The server, they say Ukraine has it,” he said to Ukrainian President Zelensky on their infamous phone call).
In one of the strangest footnotes to this story, the National Republican Congressional Committee, which is the arm of the party devoted to electing Republicans to the House, contracts with CrowdStrike to secure its own systems against cyberattack. Maybe the NRCC is in on it, too!
For Trump’s allies, conspiracy theories are not just a belief but a weapon. In her testimony, former National Security Council official Fiona Hill described the smear campaign spearheaded by Giuliani against then-ambassador to Ukraine Marie Yovanovitch this way: “This was a mishmash of conspiracy theories” that included “the idea of an association between her and George Soros.”
Of course, George Soros—the figure without whom no right-wing conspiracy theory is complete. If there’s a liberal campaign to change policy, Soros must be behind it. If liberals stage a protest, Soros must be paying the participants to attend.
Hill testified that Soros was a frequent element in charges made against her as well: that she was “a Soros mole in the White House” and that the financier was behind a conspiracy in Ukraine to attack Trump. This is something Giuliani has repeated in public as well. Meanwhile, Hill and other witnesses have been asked by Republican lawmakers about their old favorites from the Russia scandal like Christopher Steele and Bruce Ohr, as though they believe that if they attach enough lines of red thread to the bulletin board, the truth will finally be revealed.
“One Democratic official present for witness testimony said Republicans were asking witnesses things like, ‘Are you aware that part of the evidence in the Steele Dossier originated in Ukraine?’” The Washington Post reported. “‘The witnesses are like, “I have no idea what you’re talking about,” which makes sense, because it’s totally made up,’ an official said.”
On one hand, it’s an indication that when Republicans assigned seats on the Intelligence Committee, they weren’t sending their best (and it’s only going to get worse; they’ve now hastily put Representative Jim Jordan on the committee so he can run point on their efforts, apparently because the defense of Trump didn’t feature enough angry shouting). But it isn’t just that. The party has been infected so thoroughly with conspiracy theorizing that it seems to know no other way to protect the president.
The best you could say for them is that perhaps they don’t fully believe it; they’re just playing to their base. That base has been instructed on a daily basis since 2016 that conspiracy thinking is not just an explanation for any particular event but the only appropriate lens through which to view reality. Donald Trump tells them constantly that all “official” information, whether from the government or the media or any source but him, is nothing but lies. News stories are falsified, polls are fabricated, vote totals are phony, statistics are fake. The entire visible world is a sinister construction, and only he can be trusted.
To actually believe that is to live in a terrifying world. At the same time, conspiracy theories offer a kind of empowerment for the powerless, a way of thinking that both explains one’s alienation and creates a certain kind of status, at least in one’s own mind. All those sheep out there have no idea how they’re being manipulated, but I am among a small number of people strong and smart enough to grasp the real truth.
Of course, there are people on the left who have their own conspiracy theories. The difference is that you don’t see high-ranking Democratic politicians encouraging them on a daily basis. But among Republicans, that’s nearly all you see. As the president himself said last year, “Just remember: What you’re seeing and what you’re reading is not what’s happening.” He needn’t worry. They won’t forget for a second.
