New York Times columnist Michelle Goldberg said this weekend that we don’t know whether Russian President Vladimir Putin is President Trump’s “handler, his hero, or his co-conspirator.”

She should’ve stopped at “we don’t know” and quit while she was ahead.

But this is the way of the news media: A public official does or says something that people don’t quite understand, leaving the pundits with nothing but wild speculation and conjecture.

[Also read: Trump calls media ‘hypocrites’ for saying he was ‘too nice’ to Putin]

It has been this way in newsrooms for a long time, but it has gotten much worse since the rise of Trump. In fact, the fact-free speculation surrounding the president's disastrous performance last week in Helsinki is some of the worst we’ve since he announced his candidacy in 2015.

“I think that increasingly to believe that the president isn’t compromised requires such a leap of faith that requires so many coincidences and kind of inexplicable behavioral choices,” Goldberg said Sunday on ABC's "This Week.“

She added, “We don’t know, I think, if Putin is his handler, his hero, or his co-conspirator, but that’s obviously where his loyalty lies as opposed to lying with the American people.”

If you think this sort of conspiracy-mongering is wild, you haven’t seen anything yet.

“The basic question … is our president subordinate to a foreign power?” MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow asked this weekend. “Does our president answer to a foreign government and a foreign leader? ... The worst-case scenario that the president is a foreign agent suddenly feels very palpable.”

Earlier than that, just before the presser, New York magazine’s Jonathan Chait authored a lengthy column titled, “ Will Trump Be Meeting With His Counterpart — Or His Handler? A plausible theory of mind-boggling collusion.”

“Suppose the dark crevices of the Russia scandal run not just a little deeper but a lot deeper. If that’s true, we are in the midst of a scandal unprecedented in American history, a subversion of the integrity of the presidency," he wrote. "It would mean the Cold War that Americans had long considered won has dissolved into the bizarre spectacle of Reagan’s party’s abetting the hijacking of American government by a former KGB agent."

His article has everything a conspiracist could ever want, including a graphic that would make Glenn Beck weep tears of pride:

The key thing to remember in all of this is what Goldberg said this weekend: “We don’t know.” She doesn’t know. Maddow doesn’t know. Chait doesn’t know. Their colleagues don’t know. I don’t know. You don’t know.

All we know is that Trump deferred to Putin during their joint press conference in Helsinki, that Trump has extensive business ties in Russia, and that the Senate and the U.S. intelligence community believe Moscow interfered in the 2016 U.S. presidential election.

Taken together, it doesn’t look good. But it’s inconclusive. The "Manchurian Candidate" theories are fun and all, but it wouldn't hurt to wait until there’s more information available. It couldn't hurt to collect more data before going full Louise Mensch.