Trump’s Fantasy World Got Him Into This

If Donald Trump and his supporters weren’t so fond of conspiracy theories, the Ukraine scandal would never have unfolded as it did. In a now infamous July 25 phone call, Trump pushed Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to look for evidence that the cybersecurity firm CrowdStrike had hidden the Democratic National Committee’s server in his country, perhaps to conceal evidence that Russia hadn’t actually hacked the 2016 election—a right-wing media fantasy that Trump’s own former homeland-security adviser has called “completely debunked.”

And over the past week, Trump’s defenders have spread one conspiracy theory after another about the intelligence-community insider who exposed the call. , , and have all called, suggesting that a cabal of spies secretly run the government. (The conservative columnist Charles Krauthammer once to believing in the tooth fairy.)