Trump Brings This Upon Himself—And Us

If you’ve been troubled by the re-emergence of conspiracy theorizing in the American center-left, if you’re frustrated by all the people who believe Donald Trump has engineered false flag attacks against himself, I get it. But I also invite you to put yourselves in their shoes. Not because their theories have merit, but because you’ll understand why resorting to conspiracy theories is attractive specifically vis a vis Donald Trump.

Trump’s low character justifies suspecting the worst of him. His whole life has consisted of advancing various rotten schemes, of course he’d stoop deep to manipulate people for political advantage. But the more straightforward explanation is that the same low character attracts all of the chaos and violence Trump has fomented in American politics.

We can run this experiment any number of ways, but let’s start here: It’s 2019. The special counsel’s investigation into Russian election interference has just ended, and, heeding the wisdom of James Clyburn, Democrats have moved on to “the next chapter” of opposition: health care.

Elsewhere in the country, Democratic voters are trying to decide who to nominate for president. The most well-known candidate is Joe Biden, who also happens to be closely associated with Barack Obama, the most popular Democrat in the country. He isn’t the most polished or inspiring person in the field, but he feels safe. Particularly relative to the other candidates with high name recognition—Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren—both of whom poll a bit weaker than Biden against Trump head-to-head.

Trump’s advisers can read these numbers, too, and know they need to change the trajectory of the election. They need to either weaken Biden’s standing among Democrats, so that Democrats nominate a more beatable candidate, or weaken Biden’s standing with swing voters, so that Trump stands a better chance of re-election in 2020.

Then, as if the gods owed Trump a favor, a miracle: The newly elected president of Ukraine, dependent on the U.S. to resist the Russian invasion of Crimea, announces something shocking. He’s uncovered evidence that, as vice president, Biden had coerced the Ukrainian government into dropping a corruption case against the energy firm Burisma, so that his son Hunter could collect large sums of money as a member of Burisma’s board of directors. Speaking from Kyiv, Volodymyr Zelensky announces he’s transmitted evidence of this extortion scheme to United States Attorney General Bill Barr, who in turn declines to comment on “an ongoing investigation.”

The Bidens insist this is a set up, but they seem to be protesting too much. They can’t prove the negative; and Biden really did get a Ukrainian prosecutor fired—because the prosecutor was corrupt! They say if you’re explaining you’re losing; well, if you’re explaining and under grand jury investigation, you’re definitely losing.

So in lieu of proving their innocence with factual evidence, the Bidens posit a theory: That Trump blackmailed Zelensky into fabricating this allegation, threatening to illegally suspend U.S. arms shipments to Ukraine, unless Zelensky interfered in the 2020 election.

This speculation would have been 100 percent correct. But without evidence, let alone proof, it would’ve reeked of desperation. Trump derangement syndrome. Reckless slander. If you’d posited it out of nowhere, people would’ve called you a conspiracy theorist and told you to touch grass.

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There was a whistleblower, so we’ll never know how things might’ve played out differently. But you can see that if Trump had kept his phone call to Zelensky under wraps, history might have unfolded differently. And there are many such cases. Indeed, to an under-appreciated extent, Trump’s politics really do play out as a series of schemes—criminal conspiracies in some cases—most of which would sound like deranged conspiracy theories if they unfolded as planned, and you tried to make sense of them after the fact. ...