WASHINGTON — On the morning of the Senate Intelligence Committee hearing with James Comey, the former director of the F.B.I., a number of bars here opened early to allow political groupies to celebrate or drown their sorrows while watching the proceedings live.

I’m afraid that I let this experience pass me by. I had to work, and besides, I didn’t think the hearing would do anything to change President Trump’s behavior, or his base’s indulgence of it.

It’s true that President Trump’s ratings are the lowest of any modern president at this point in a first term, which has hamstrung his ability to pass any major legislation. But he has triumphantly succeeded in turning politics into spectacle, transforming the complicated process of government into something more like made-for-TV drama. A lot of his supporters care more about the fight than the results, and the sense that the whole production is faked only adds to their enjoyment.

As a political historian who writes mainly about the Republican Party, I’ve often puzzled over why far-right groups during the 1950s and ’60s had such an appetite for obvious falsehoods. Robert Welch Jr., a founder of the John Birch Society, famously maintained that President Dwight Eisenhower, a Republican, was “a dedicated, conscious agent of the Communist conspiracy.” Other extremist groups charged that a committee of University of Chicago eggheads was rewriting the Constitution to deprive Americans of their rights to vote and hold property, and that the United Nations was training barefoot African cannibals in Georgia for an armed takeover of the United States. Did the people who read those made-up stories actually believe them?