Setting the stage for conspiracy

“The Justice Department's decision to drop its prosecution of former national security adviser Michael Flynn…was greeted as a triumph by President Trump and his allies, who have argued for years that Flynn was set up — but with dire alarm by Trump's opponents, who saw the move as an attack on the rule of law. The extreme division mirrored three years of partisan combat over how the FBI handled Russian interference in the 2016 U.S. presidential election, an investigation that shadowed much of Trump's time in office.”
– Washington Post, 5-7-20

I’m not given to believing elaborate, “inside job” conspiracy theories – not about the JFK assassination or the 9/11 attacks or much of anything else. But now I’m confronted with two conspiracy theories, each one of which is believed by millions of Americans, though by two distinct sets of Americans on opposite sides of the political divide.

Conspiracy A

Many Democrats – and not just Democrats – believe that the Trump campaign conspired with the Russians to throw the 2016 election Trump’s way. The cast of supposed evil-doing conspirators includes Donald Trump, Vladimir Putin, Yevgeny Prigozhin, Sergey Kislyak, Natalia Veselnitskaya, Jeff Sessions, the GRU (Russian hackers), Julian Assange, Guccifer 2.0, Michael Flynn, Paul Manafort, Rick Gates, Michael Cohen, Roger Stone, George Papadopoulos, Carter Page, Donald Trump Jr., Jared Kushner, among others. And many believe there is another cast of characters, in Congress and the Trump administration, who have worked to cover-up the conspiracy, including Devin Nunes, Trey Gowdy, Lindsey Graham, Mitch McConnell, Richard Grenell, and, of course, Bill Barr.

Conspiracy B

Many Republicans – and not just Republicans – believe in the existence of a different conspiracy, hatched by Trump’s many political enemies, to bring down the new prez and his administration. The cast of characters for this supposed conspiracy includes Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Susan Rice, John Brennan, James Clapper, Sally Yates, James Comey, Andrew McCabe, Peter Strzok, Lisa Page, Joe Pientka, Samantha Power, Christopher Steele, and Fusion GPS, among others. And many believe there are those in Congress and various federal agencies who are now working to hide this conspiracy from public view, among whom Adam Schiff is perhaps the most prominent figure.

The media can rather easily be divided according to which conspiracy theory each news outlet has promoted and which it has sought to debunk.

(Rod Rosenstein, oddly enough, can be counted among the conspirators on either, both, or neither side.)

Conspiracy A and Conspiracy B are not mutually exclusive.

One could believe, at least hypothetically, both that the Russians conspired with Trump & company, and that a cabal in the Obama White House, the DOJ, and the FBI conspired to undermine a duly elected president not of its liking. It’s also possible that neither is true, i.e., that whatever the Russians were up to, they did it on their own, and that all the federal agencies and political actors involved in the various investigations, prosecutions, and the rest of it operated strictly on the up and up.

I wish I could say that all intelligent, fair-minded people have reached the same conclusion as to which, if either, of these conspiracy theories holds water. But one feature of America’s current polarization is that millions of Americans believe that leaders of one political party – their party – operate from a moral code while leaders of the other party will say and do anything to gain and hold power. Meanwhile, the question remains concerning our last presidential election and the conduct of our government both before and after that election: Who, if anyone, unlawfully conspired with whom in the name of what over the last four years? Unfortunately, a commonly agreed upon answer to that question is not likely to emerge any time soon, if ever.

Based on what we know for certain

What no sane person on either side disputes at this point--the only coherent explanation for Russia’s involvement in our 2016 presidential election is that their overriding goal was to screw with us. Thus, they offered dirt on HRC to the Trump campaign, and actually provided dirt on Trump to the Clinton campaign. But as it seemed more and more likely that Clinton would win, the Russians ramped up their Trump support. Their logic isn’t hard to decipher: they figured that if they kept the election close, there would be lots and lots of rubes among Trump supporters who would never accept the legitimacy of an HRC presidency.

The Russians got it right, but also wrong.

Trump won, so they got that bit wrong. But there were indeed lots and lots of rubes among Clinton supporters who never accepted the legitimacy of the Trump presidency. Those rubes, as it happen, dominate the editorial pages of the NY Times, the WaPo, the New Yorker, MSNBC, CNN, ABC, NBC, CBS, and faculty lounges coast to coast.

Of course, had Clinton won, there's little reason to believe that Trump's supporters in and out of the media would have behaved any better. The Russians, it turns out, know us pretty damn well.