Illustration: Damon Dahlen/HuffPost; Photos: Getty

President Donald Trump believes in a conspiracy theory. His belief in it explains the scandal that could lead to his impeachment. Specifically, the president is convinced that the Democratic National Committee and his enemies in the U.S. government — the people he sometimes calls the “deep state” — framed Russia as the nation that hacked the DNC in 2016. The world knows this because Trump privately asked Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky to find a supposedly missing computer server that Trump’s fellow conspiracists believe will prove Russia’s innocence — and because his senior aides have been dispatched all over the world to recruit America’s allies to aid an “investigation” of the supposedly malicious origins of the U.S. government’s probe into Russian interference in the 2016 election. The idea of a secret deep state that outlasts presidential administrations and operates by its own hidden directives predates the Trump administration. Liberals once promulgated the narrative to explain how President Barack Obama failed to achieve all the change he had promised. And like many conspiracy theories, the deep state thesis incorporates some partial truths. It’s true that the U.S. government is a massive institution, populated by some two million civilian employees who serve across administrations of both parties. Many of those civil servants even share similar broad values — patriotism and civic responsibility, for example. Where Trump and his fellow conspiracy theorists go wrong, though, is in assuming that all those people can be pulling in the same partisan direction, united by a single (and secret) common purpose. Like their fellow Americans, government employees have a wide range of political beliefs. There’s no doubt that many of them preferred Hillary Clinton to Donald Trump in the last presidential election. But many of the U.S. government’s actions during the 2016 campaign ― including FBI Director James Comey’s press conference accusing Clinton of being “extremely careless” in her handling of classified information and his election-eve letter announcing the FBI had reopened its investigation into her emails ― hurt the Clinton campaign and boosted Trump’s. So did the hack of the DNC’s emails. Independent experts, investigative reporters and the entire U.S. intelligence community have all determined that Russia was responsible for that crime. But Trump and his supporters have been working on an alternative theory: that the FBI’s secret, nonpublic investigation of Trump campaign associates with connections to Russia during the 2016 campaign somehow hurt his electoral prospects. The fervent belief in that “alternative fact” is what led Trump to ask Zelensky to find that supposedly missing server that sympathetic conspiracy theorists contend will demonstrate that Russia isn’t to blame — and show that the “deep state” really is out to get the president. It doesn’t make sense, of course. “I don’t know who needs to hear this (AGAIN),” Tim Miller, a Trump foe who was the communications director for Jeb Bush’s presidential campaign, tweeted on Monday, “but [the] idea that US intel was engaged in a global conspiracy to defeat Donald Trump does not really square with the fact that their only public involvement in the campaign was a press conference knifing Hillary in the closing weeks.” Even though the conspiracy theory “has no validity,” it “sticks in [Trump’s] mind” because “he hears it over and over again” from his bagman and personal lawyer, former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani, said Trump’s former top homeland security adviser Tom Bossert, speaking to ABC News’ George Stephanopoulos on Sunday. It’s easy to see why Trump might want to believe this. If true, which it’s not, this conspiracy theory would mean that Trump is the victim of a loathsome and wide-ranging conspiracy. It would mean that, rather than having won the election while benefiting from Russian aid, he won the election in spite of an illegal and corrupt effort to bring him down.

The Deep State is the big story of our time. Mike Lofgren, a former GOP congressional aide who popularized the term

The idea that elements of the government are working in concert to block the president’s agenda is an attractive one — so attractive, in fact, that it was once popular on the left. The roots of the deep state narrative in American political discourse lie not in Trump’s election, but in the partisan polarization that engulfed Obama’s presidency after the 2010 midterm election. It was former GOP congressional aide Mike Lofgren who, in a widely cited 2014 essay on BillMoyers.com, popularized the term “the deep state” to refer to “another, more shadowy, more indefinable government” that “operates according to its own compass heading regardless of who is formally in power.” By that point, Lofgren was already a conservative apostate, having written a viral 2011 Truthout.org essay denouncing the takeover of the GOP by the tea party, which he characterized as an “apocalyptic cult” “full of lunatics” who espoused an anti-science, anti-intellectual line. Like all grand narratives, Lofgren’s deep state treatise was wildly ambitious. He condemned congressional Republicans who desired to “render the executive branch powerless” and block Obama’s domestic agenda with their incessant filibustering and stonewalling. But in the wake of National Security Agency whistleblower Edward Snowden’s revelations, he also railed against a deep state that mired the country in endless wars and widening government surveillance, along with a financial elite who stymied real economic reforms. “The Deep State does not consist of the entire government,” Lofgren wrote. “It is a hybrid of national security and law enforcement agencies: the Department of Defense, the Department of State, the Department of Homeland Security, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Justice Department. I also include the Department of the Treasury because of its jurisdiction over financial flows, its enforcement of international sanctions and its organic symbiosis with Wall Street.” For besotted liberals in the Obama years, this was a beguiling narrative. It explained Obama’s failure to achieve much on the domestic front after the passage of the Affordable Care Act, while also excusing his administration’s dispiriting continuation and, in some cases, expansion of some of the Bush administration’s worst policies in the war on terror. Obama, Lofgren posited, had been captured — by the deep state. “The Deep State is the big story of our time,” Lofgren claimed. “It is the red thread that runs through the war on terrorism, the financialization and deindustrialization of the American economy, the rise of a plutocratic social structure and political dysfunction. Washington is the headquarters of the Deep State.” Then, as the 2016 election came into view, the deep state narrative made the leap into and metastasized throughout the right-wing press. In the fall of 2015, the alt-right, free-market, cryptocurrency-loving website Zerohedge picked up on Lofgren’s theory. In a pair of influential posts written by “Tyler Durden,” the site’s house pseudonym, ZeroHedge amplified Lofgren’s manifesto, calling the deep state the modern-day offshoot of what Dwight Eisenhower once described as the “military-industrial complex.” In an unwittingly prescient summary of Trump’s paranoia, Zerohedge warned in November 2015 that the “next president will ... also inherit a shadow government, one that is fully operational and staffed by unelected officials who are, in essence, running the country.” Once sowed, the deep state narrative flourished in the conservative press, especially as the 2016 election neared and it became clearer to Republicans that Trump would likely lose the popular vote to former Secretary of State Clinton. “The real danger is not if Trump loses and somehow undermines the integrity of America’s democratic elections,” conservative writer Michael Brendan Dougherty warned in The Week. “The truly great danger is if he wins and America’s elite undermine the integrity of our democracy by failing to support his presidency.” “Would the more than two million people employed by the executive branch faithfully execute the orders of a President Trump?” Dougherty wondered. And so, when Trump entered the White House in 2017, he soon became obsessed with the idea that he was the victim of an effort by Obama administration loyalists to undermine his presidency.

Trump’s key goal remains to cast doubt on the idea that Russian government operatives meddled in the 2016 election with the goal of helping him win.

Charles McCullough, the respected fmr Intel Comm Inspector General, said public was misled on Crooked Hillary Emails. “Emails endangered National Security.” Why aren’t our deep State authorities looking at this? Rigged & corrupt? @TuckerCarlson@seanhannity — Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 29, 2017

Over the years, these deep state conspiracy theories have twisted and blended together in the president’s mind into an incoherent hodgepodge of falsehoods that all lead to the same conclusion ― that Trump has survived sustained attacks by a powerful cabal of people within government who are hell-bent on destroying him. Trump’s key goal remains to cast doubt on the idea that Russian government operatives meddled in the 2016 election with the goal of helping him win. Since 2017, Trump has repeatedly tweeted about the DNC’s refusal to turn over its hacked servers to the FBI for an investigation. Instead, the DNC hired Crowdstrike, a U.S.-based cybersecurity firm, to investigate the hack; Crowdstrike then gave its forensic analysis to the FBI. Over time, this has morphed into the false conspiracy theory that there is a “missing server,” possibly located in Ukraine because a Ukrainian oligarch supposedly teamed up with the DNC to dishonestly implicate Moscow in the hack. None of that is true. Until recently, it was possible to argue that Trump doesn’t actually believe this conspiracy theory, but was simply spreading it to rile up his base. But last week, it became clear that Trump’s tweets reflect his own understanding of events. We know this because he’s repeating the conspiratorial allegations he makes on Twitter in private, confidential conversations, too, according to the summary of a July 25 phone call between Trump and Ukraine’s Zelensky that the White House released last Wednesday. According to the summary, Trump told Zelensky: “Find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine, they say Crowdstrike … I guess you have one of your wealthy people … The server, they say Ukraine has it.” On the same call, Trump told Zelensky that the former U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Marie Yovanovitch, was “bad news” and was “going to go through some things.” The president’s issue with Yovanovitch, a career diplomat who joined the foreign service in 1986 and was abruptly recalled from Ukraine this spring, appears to be that he believes right-wing claims that she tried to stymie a Ukrainian investigation of those who purportedly aided the (non-existent) DNC plot against Trump in 2016.

What President Trump asked for on that call did not appear to be the result of any sort of policy process. It was his own personal political agenda. Dana Shell Smith, a former U.S. ambassador, referring to the call with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky