Donald Trump Is Pressuring U.S. Allies To Endorse His Favorite Conspiracy Theory

Joshua Geltzer was quoted in an article for Huffpost about Trump pushing foreign leaders to aid in his search for validation of his favorite conspiracy theory.

President Donald Trump believes in a conspiracy theory. His belief in it explains the scandal that could lead to his impeachment.

Specifically, the president is convinced that the Democratic National Committee and his enemies in the U.S. government — the people he sometimes calls the “deep state” — framed Russia as the nation that hacked the DNC in 2016. The world knows this because Trump privately asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to find a supposedly missing computer server that Trump’s fellow conspiracists believe will prove Russia’s innocence — and because his senior aides have been dispatched all over the world to recruit America’s allies to aid an “investigation” of the supposedly malicious origins of the U.S. government’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election.

The idea of a secret deep state that outlasts presidential administrations and operates by its own hidden directives predates the Trump administration. Liberals once promulgated the narrative to explain how President Barack Obama failed to achieve all the change he had promised. And like many conspiracy theories, the deep state thesis incorporates some partial truths. It’s true that the U.S. government is a massive institution, populated by some two million civilian employees who serve across administrations of both parties. Many of those civil servants even share similar broad values — patriotism and civic responsibility, for example.