This archive report was first published on 21 December 2019.
On December 21, 2019, the impeachment of President Trump was a result of a conspiracy theory. While Democrats and their supporters might be reluctant to accept this label, a conspiracy theory is not inherently wrong or crackpot. If the conspiracy is real, the theory may be correct.
Democrats were convinced that President Trump, his lawyer Rudy Giuliani, and others conspired to get Ukraine to open an investigation that would embarrass Joe Biden and influence the 2020 presidential election. However, not a single House Republican was swayed by this theory, and the line between politics and intelligence was blurred.
President Trump's combative attitude towards Democrats, the media, and the intelligence community may be an expression of his personality, but it's also a way to fight back against what he perceives as a common culture and interest among his opponents. The Trump years have seen numerous conspiracy theories and counter-theories, but the reality is that President Trump and his voters want a different America and world than their opponents.
Even marginal cases, such as Tulsi Gabbard's 'present' vote, reveal the overlap between party and a willingness to believe in the plot laid out by Democrats. Republicans, too, have their own conspiracy theories, including President Trump's belief in a Crowdstrike-Ukraine story. He asked President Zelensky to investigate whether a computer server once belonging to the Democratic National Committee had wound up in Ukraine as part of a cover-up, aided by the company, of Ukraine's role in a 2016 hack of D.N.C. computers.
There is no evidence to support this theory, but President Trump seems sincere. His belief in this story may be due to a wider theory that Democrats and elements of the US intelligence community conspired to sabotage his 2016 campaign and presidency. Democrats might have framed impeachment as a matter of President Trump's readiness to buy into false conspiracy theories, but this would not be a crime in itself.
Intelligence agencies are meant to look for conspiracies, and in a sense, they are conspiracies themselves. The mixture of elements involved in giving birth to the conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump and his campaign were tools of the Kremlin is troubling. These elements include an intelligence community predisposed to view dissent as subversive, opposition research firms, foreign intelligence operatives, and a national media with biases.
Sharp disagreements are essential to a robust democratic system, but it's essential for those who resist President Trump's changes to recognize that his sincere intentions are explanation enough for what he is doing. He does not have to be a Russian asset to do the things he is doing.
