It seems we're on an inexorable journey into the dangerously insane, as the President of the United States tries anything and everything to fend off what increasingly look like actual consequences for his cartoonishly corrupt conduct in office.

Donald Trump did not suddenly become worthy of impeachment when The Ukraine Affair blasted into the national consciousness last month. From the jump, he has held onto his private business interests while making American foreign policy, a rolling series of conflicts of interest which brings every decision he makes into question: did he side with Saudi Arabia because it's in the interests of the American people, or because the Saudis are pouring money into his pocket? He has also trampled, repeatedly and in a variety of ways, the separation of powers that forms the backbone of our constitutional system. He ushered in a system of human rights abuses at the souther border. He maintains that climate change, an existential threat to human civilization as we know it, does not exist, and rolls back our efforts to combat it.

Still, there seems to be something different about The Ukraine Affair. In the scheme of things, it's simple and easy to follow: the president tried to force a foreign power to interfere in an American election in a way that would damage his political opponent, subjugating the national interest to his personal interest and betraying his oath of office in the process. It's linear, and it all happened fast—unlike the Russia probe, which contained some of the same behaviors but was baroque and spread across a comparatively expansive length of time.

Got caught trying to collude for 2020? To the 2016mobile! Chip Somodevilla Getty Images

The simplicity of the Ukraine fiasco has given it real bite, to the point that even House Democrats felt compelled to act. It has also caused the president and his defenders to go absolutely batshit insane trying to fight it. The response from Fox News to pretty much every Trumpian scandal thus far has been to spin glorious whataboutist counter-conspiracy theories about the dark and vile deeds of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama, but the scale of the Ukraine task has brought out the best—read: worst—in these propagandistic loons. We are headed deep into the vortex now, as Trump and his apparatchiks try to finish the job of constructing an alternate reality for his followers that is completely walled off from anything you might observe in the physical world.

On Monday night, Trumpian BFF Sean Hannity took the lead. He played the hits in his opening monologue—The Deep State; Hillary; Christopher Steele; But But The Democrats—and then played host to one Rudolph Giuliani. The former mayor of New York has successfully destroyed the goodwill he secured when he was graded on a curve following the 9/11 attacks, and last night he elected to dance on that goodwill's grave.

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Giuliani begins his Hannity interview by pushing a conspiracy theory about Obama and Hillary Clinton colluding with Ukraine to dig up dirt on Trump in January 2017 -- which doesn't make much sense since the presidential election had come and gone by then pic.twitter.com/08yHvUYcgJ — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 1, 2019

It is impossible for Giuliani not to "exaggerate" this, no matter how much he says he doesn't want to, because he is just making it up. They are just making all this up. January 2017 is after the election was over. Trump had already won. He was already going to be president. But HillaryandObama launched a collusion campaign...then? People talk about "projection" with this president, but his allies' strategy now seems to be Literally Just Say Democrats Did the Exact Thing You Already Admitted to Doing in Public. This was on show elsewhere in the interview:

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It's insane how obsessed these guys are with Joe Biden. They do realize there are other strong Democratic candidates still in the race, right? pic.twitter.com/e6rcUraYuB — Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) October 1, 2019

"A family—the Biden family—that has been using as an asset, for themselves, his public office." Good thing he included that appositive, otherwise anyone without a severe case of Fox News Brain would have immediately assumed he was talking about the Trumps. Nobody has more blatantly traded on the presidency than Trump and his failkids.

Trump himself has business entanglements with two dozen foreign countries while he makes American policy towards those countries. But Ivanka, in a strange coincidence, also keeps getting patents approved in China while working in her father's White House. Jared Kushner engaged in a sham divestment from his family's real estate firm—again, while working in the White House. Tweedledee and Tweedledumbass, the oldest Trump sons, promised to stay out of politics while they ran the family company in their father's "absence" (they did not), and pledged not to pursue foreign business while their father was making American foreign policy (they did). But based on their track record, we can safely assume they aren't trading on their father's office while pursuing these deals.

Later, Hannity invited on United States Senator Lindsey Graham—who has plummeted to Worst In Show in seemingly record time—to do the same damn thing.

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Sean Hannity says Australia, Italy and Great Britain illegally spied on the Trump campaign for Obama and Lindsey Graham says he isn't sure if they did, but maybe pic.twitter.com/b5R7a2M4pC — Andrew Lawrence (@ndrew_lawrence) October 1, 2019

Yesterday, we learned Trump and his pet toad of an attorney general, William Barr, have been reaching out to Australia and Italy and the U.K. to build their sham case that the investigation into Russian interference in 2016 was somehow illegitimate. (This could very conveniently absolve Russia, which Trump was accused of getting in bed with, of any culpability.) Previously, we learned Trump was trying to collude with Ukraine ahead of 2020. So Hannity and Graham's response was simply to say that actually, Obama colluded with those exact countries in 2016!



This has all the hallmarks of a dumbass theory straight out of the conservative infotainment vortex: Obama, Hillary, and a dastardly plot by a shadowy international cabal allied with Democrats that was so powerful it orchestrated a scheme to defeat Trump that completely failed. But this seems to be the strategy going forward for the president and his pathetic defenders: accuse the various Enemies of the exact things you've been accused of—and, in some cases, already admitted to—in the hopes that your supporters are too deep in the vortex to hear about what actually happened in reality. Maybe some people who don't have time to pay close attention to the news will hear Both Sides saying the other was colluding with Australia and Italy and just tune it out. Muddy the waters, obfuscate, and hope to grift another day: now that's Presidential.



Jack Holmes Politics Editor Jack Holmes is the Politics Editor at Esquire, where he writes daily and edits the Politics Blog with Charles P Pierce.

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