Devin Nunes, the top Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, said Thursday that the impeachment inquiry had “poisoned the minds of fanatics,” and he was absolutely right—but not quite in the way that he meant. His comments, aimed at Democrats, instead came across in the hearing as projection, a sad summation of the intellectual rot that has spread through his own party during the Trump age.
President Trump, his defenders, and the Republican Party writ large have increasingly tied themselves in tighter and tighter knots, piling one conspiracy theory atop another. There’s the “Russia Hoax,” the “Deep State,” the idea that US intelligence had an “insurance policy” to keep Trump from winning, the crazy notion that the cybersecurity firm Crowdstrike is somehow hiding the DNC’s server in Ukraine (an idea still being pushed by former representative Sean Duffy).
And then there are two other widely discredited Ukraine-focused conspiracy theories that Trump himself appears to believe: That Ukraine actually was responsible for the 2016 election attack carried out by Russian intelligence, and that somehow Joe Biden, Hunter Biden, and the Ukrainian company Burisma are wrapped up in some corrupt embrace worthy of criminal charges.
That’s before you even get to ..
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