IT started as a face-saving exercise by Hillary Clinton to try to explain away her election loss to a vulgarian real estate billionaire from Queens.

But the absurd Russia conspiracy has somehow snowballed into a crisis that threatens to bring down Donald Trump, has all but paralysed his administration, and unleashed the most unhinged attacks on a US president in living memory.

Inevitably, last week the violent language and “Assassinate Trump” memes erupted in a burst of deadly gunfire at an early morning baseball practice for Republican congressmen near Washington, DC.

The gunman was 66-year-old James Hodgkinson, a left-wing Bernie Sanders activist and campaign volunteer, whose social media postings show him to be a classic Trump hater.

He died in hospital after being shot by Capitol Hill officers guarding Majority Whip Steve Scalise. Without them it would have been a massacre.

Scalise remains in hospital, the bullet having smashed into his hip and travelled through his pelvis, damaging organs.

Fox News rightly called it a left-wing assassination attempt, the inevitable extension of the hyperbole and violent “resistance” that has engulfed the US since Trump’s election, and which has been tacitly encouraged by Democrat grandees, by Clinton, by former President Obama, by Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer, Senator Dianne Feinstein and Nancy Pelosi.

In demonising Trump to delegitimise his victory, they effectively sanction ever more violent rhetoric from celebrities which would have the average Muslim teenager locked up.

There was Madonna telling a women’s rally she’d “thought a lot about blowing up the White House” and “comedian” Kathy Griffin posing with a mocked up decapitated head of Trump dripping with blood, an image which we are told traumatised his young son.

There was the Snoop Dog music video in which he “shoots” a Trump lookalike in the head with a fake gun. Currently playing in New York is a Shakespeare in the Park performance which depicts Trump as Julius Caesar being brutally stabbed to death by women and minorities.

The left-wing Huffington Post ran a story last weekend which called for the “execution” of Trump because “impeachment isn’t enough”.

So it’s no surprise that actual violence erupted.

media_camera Republican Steve Scalise was shot by a classic Donald Trump hater. (Pic: AP Photo/Alex Brandon, File)

As Newt Gingrich, the former Republican speaker of the House said: “You’ve had a series of things that send signals that it’s OK to hate Trump, it’s OK to think of Trump in violent terms, it’s OK to consider assassinating Trump.”

Yet those afflicted with Trump Derangement Syndrome justify their “resistance” with the delusion that Trump is some sort of Manchurian candidate, a Russian agent selling out his country. Despite a distinct lack of evidence and clearly partisan leaks from intelligence sources linked to the Obama administration, the entire justice apparatus has been employed to investigate this preposterous Russia conspiracy.

The Justice Department has appointed a special counsel, there are FBI probes and congressional inquiries. It has led to the forced resignation of General Mike Flynn as Trump’s national security adviser, the sacking of FBI director James Comey, allegations of Russia collusion against Attorney-General Jeff Sessions, and, finally, reports last week that Trump himself is under investigation for obstruction of justice.

Those pushing the conspiracy don’t want Trump to be able to govern. They don’t like the way the election turned out and they don’t respect the people who voted for him.

Yet they never acknowledge that Trump and his team had legitimate reason to want to restore good relations with Vladimir Putin.

media_camera Hillary Clinton has tacitly encouraged the violent “resistance” against Donald Trump and his administration. (Pic: AP Photo/Patrick Semansky)

They forget how culpable the Obama administration was in the Syrian disaster, prevaricating, arming anti-government “rebels” which effectively meant assisting ISIS, and prolonging the civil war.

As Clinton’s leaked emails show, she pushed for “regime change” in Libya — that turned out well — and wanted to do the same in Syria.

It was only Russia, for its own reasons, stepping in to support the Assad regime in Syria, which stopped the rise of ISIS. Anyone who cares about the plight of Christians in the Middle East would know that the Assad government, repellent as it may be, is the only barrier to total Christian genocide.

What the left also won’t tell you is that their rejection of Trump is driven by visceral loathing of the evangelical Christians who voted him into office, with their opposition to progressive shibboleths from identity politics and extreme feminism and abortion to same sex marriage.

Putin also is supported by socially conservative Christians in Russia and has been vilified worldwide since he introduced a “gay propaganda” law in 2013 which bans the promotion of homosexuality to minors and was labelled “state-sponsored homophobia” by LGBTQI activists.

The alignment of Putin and Trump, even if only to defeat a common Islamist enemy, stirs paranoid antipathy among progressives for reasons they have not spelled out.

Hillary Clinton was a terrible candidate: secretive, entitled, unpleasant, you name it. Her recklessness in using a private server for classified State Department documents and the sloppiness of her campaign which made her emails vulnerable to hacking, whether or not it was by Russia.

She couldn’t articulate why she was running for President other than because she was a woman and it was her turn.

Her strategy was to dehumanise Trump and his voters as a “basket of deplorables” - “racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamophobic”, as she told an LGBTQI fundraiser in New York during the campaign.

Trump’s unlikely victory was a repudiation of Clinton personally and more generally of the left’s entire bankrupt project of identity politics.

That’s why they will do anything to overturn the result.