The impeachment train

But in the laying out of both the case against Trump and the case in his defense you find the pattern that has repeated in these last few years by which serious people end up backing themselves into conspiracy theories because they want the world to make sense. The incoherent jumble of Trump’s own mind, backed now with the enormous power of the American presidency, has the capacity to create a real world that doesn’t hang together. When we each try to explain it to ourselves and others, we naturally incline to fill in blanks and sketch connections that might make it all cohere, and so we end up painting perverse conspiracies, most of which are surely false. We can already see that happening in this case, as we all try to reason our way through an avalanche of unfamiliar figures and preposterous events and end up acting like we’ve always had strong views about how many people listen to presidential phone calls and the relative merits of different Ukrainian state prosecutors.

Many conversations with people who have spent a lot of time with Trump these last few years have left me thinking that Trump’s world is probably less perverted than either his detractors or his champions end up suggesting, because it’s less cogent. Why did one thing follow another? The answer is probably just not as lucid as you or I will tend to expect. That doesn’t mean Trump doesn’t know what he’s doing, or that he’s not basically a narcissistic thug. It just means that what he knows himself to be doing probably isn’t what people who follow politics think it would be.