Jonathan Chait’s New York magazine cover story this week takes the Russiagate conspiracy to the next level — linking President Trump to Russian operatives since 1987, when the then-businessman first visited the country.

Chait’s piece is long, rambling and plagued with speculation, but its existence is no surprise: With Trump’s summit with Russian President Vladimir Putin set for Monday, even mainstream left-wing publications have gone conspiracy crazy.

Many associate conspiracism with the far right. But since the 2016 election, when the left lost control of the House, Senate and White House, a new strain of conspiracists has emerged, devoted to proving Russia set up Trump for the presidency.

The movement began on the fringes, with figures like British tabloid journalist Louise Mensch’s website Patribotics, obscure journalist Bill Palmer’s The Palmer Report and former NSA spy John Schindler’s paranoia-inducing Twitter account.

Their single-sourced, almost always anonymously tipped stories about Trump’s relationship with Russia often go viral because Democratic political figures, liberal professors and the Trump-hating left-wing base are eager to score one against the president.

When The New York Times published Mensch’s op-ed “What to Ask About Russian Hacking” in March 2017, the left dipped to a new low in its hunger for dirt on Trump — anything accusatory — no matter how improbable.

Mensch positioned herself as a voice of authority and posed a series of questions she said must be asked to get to the bottom of the election conspiracy. It didn’t matter that she had no experience in US politics and that her reporting had consistently been shoddy; Mensch’s spitfire fed the hunger.

At the same time, prominent Democrats started promoting stories from The Palmer Report. In June 2017, Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.) declared on CNN that he had it on good authority that a grand jury had convened to probe Trump’s alleged collusion with Russia. The report was false. Ned Price, former special assistant to President Barack Obama, similarly tweeted a story in May 2017, speculating that Rep. Jason Chaffetz (R-Utah) resigned because of Kremlin blackmailing threats. When criticized for spreading fake news, Price responded, “Every once in a blue moon, the tin hat can fit.”

This approving attitude keeps Russiagate conspiracists going and allows journalists like Chait to hop aboard the crazy train without fear of reproach from readers. In his New York piece, he compiles conspiracy theories floated by the likes of Mensch, Palmer and their ilk to construct a monster supercut of two years of paranoia.

In one of the most notable examples, Chait picks up on The Palmer Report’s theory (by way of unverified reports in the Steele dossier) that the Kremlin is in possession of video footage showing Trump watching Russian prostitutes urinate on a bed the Obamas slept in. Putin is using the tape, Palmer asserts, to blackmail Trump, and the president “may have already acted on it in a manner which would be both treasonous and murderous.”

Citing numerous other examples of Trump’s indecency, Chait arrives at a similar conclusion, but still without offering any evidence that there even is a video. Instead, he claims that, even without any corroborating evidence, Trump’s unpredictable persona is enough to believe there is “growing reason to think the pee tape might indeed exist.”

Chait obsesses over the minute actions of everyone close to Trump, and even the people sort-of near him, such as Blackwater founder Erik Prince. At a meeting with a Russian in 2017, Chait asserts, Prince sought to establish back channels of communication between Trump and Russia.

Yet no reliable details of the meeting are available. And Chait doesn’t even try to explain how it fits his narrative: It’s just part of the ever-widening web of subterfuge.

But by one-upping even the fringe foil-hat-wearers with his sweeping vision of Trump’s entire career as an ally of Russia, Chait mistakes the trees for the forest. Even if the president played foul in 2016, it’s unlikely he was a Manchurian candidate forged in Moscow back in the Soviet days.

Chait forgets that this is an increasingly global world, and everyone has ties to Russia, just by buying gas or watching the World Cup. Drawing jagged lines of connection between Trump and Putin is as easy as constructing a web of interactions between the Clintons and Russia. Anyone with access to Twitter, reddit or 4chan can do it — and many have.

Back in 2016, Hillary Clinton reaffirmed her belief in a “vast right-wing conspiracy” trying to steal her shot president. Two years later, the conspiracy has yet to emerge: All we’ve seen is a ballooning left-wing conspiracy theory.

Nic Rowan writes for the Washington Free Beacon.