The conspiracy-theorist-in-chief tries his hand at conspiring
Gordon Sondland drew a blank. The details of his July 26 call with President Trump, conducted on a cell phone in a restaurant in Kyiv, Ukraine, are fuzzy, the U.S. ambassador to the European Union testified Wednesday at the fourth day of public hearings in the House impeachment inquiry. Yet he has "no reason to doubt that this conversation included the subject of investigations" Trump allegedly pressured the Ukrainian president to conduct, Sondland said. "Actually, I would have been more surprised if President Trump had not mentioned investigations."
And well he should be, for Trump has spent years yammering on about conspiracies. It would be surprising if he didn't bring that obsession into the White House, if he failed to seize the unique opportunities of his office both to probe at least some of the conspiracy theories he believes to be true — most obviously here, that a hacked DNC server is located in Ukraine — and to conspire himself.
Conspiracy theories are rarely necessary to understand our world — simple self-interest, cruelty, and incompetence usually have more explanatory power — but they are demonstrably attractive to the president. Trump's infamous years-long fixation on former President Obama's birth certificate is just the start.
During the 2016 election, recall, Trump suggested the father of his then-rival, Sen. Ted Cruz (R-Texas), was involved in the assassination of former President Kennedy. He retweeted birther allegations against Cruz and Sen. Marco Rubio (R-Fla.). He claimed the Islamic State attacked him at a campaign rally. He ran ads proposing Syrian refugees "could be ISIS." He promoted a theory that Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia was murdered by being smothered with a pillow. He raised the possiblity that a Clinton aide who died in 1993 was also murdered. He had a dalliance with the antivax movement.
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