The White House/Flickr

The House managers spent a good amount of time during the impeachment trial on Thursday talking about how ridiculous it was for the president of the United States to be pushing the Crowdstrike conspiracy theory on a foreign head of state. Trump took an impossible and silly story cooked up by the Russians and deputized Rudy Giuliani to convince Ukraine to formally accept it by announcing that they would investigate it.

Perhaps the most farcical part of this is that the theory attempts to blame Ukraine for hacking into the Democratic National Headquarters and then spreading the most damaging information to WikiLeaks in order to hurt Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign. At the same time, Russia and Trump argue that Ukraine was trying to help Clinton in 2016.

These two ideas are mutually exclusive, but that doesn’t matter to the Kremlin or the White House.

In the president’s defense, Senator Lindsey Graham says, “All I can tell you is from the president’s point of view, he did nothing wrong in his mind,” and if Trump “thought he was doing something wrong, he would probably shut up about it.”

It’s an interesting defense, in part because it’s not really clear that it’s true.

After all, Trump would not be president today if he had not first promoted the Obama birther conspiracy theory and thereby won over a good part of the conservative base that reveled in his audacious and unrepentant racism. That theory was equally implausible, holding that Barack Obama should not be president because he wasn’t born in America, even though that alone would not have made him ineligible. Obama’s mother was an American citizen, so even if he had been born in Kenya, he still would have been considered a natural-born citizen. In any case, all the evidence supported the fact that Obama had been born in Honolulu.

In 2011, Trump claimed that he’d paid for investigators to visit Hawaii and that they had found evidence to support his theory. He was lying.