What’s going on here? The perverse incentives of cable news and social media begin to explain it, I think. Being on TV makes you feel important, and getting retweets and likes online makes you feel important as well. Over the course of the Trump administration, MSNBC became the channel of anti-Trump partisanship, collecting respected figures from various law enforcement, national security, and journalistic institutions into a coalition. Those people, whatever expertise and judgment they’d previously accumulated, may have increasingly begun communicating only with each other and with their audiences. They also had one single goal, which came to feel like a holy crusade: Getting rid of Donald Trump. Amid the frenzy, perhaps their standards of sourcing and skepticism have eroded.

They also never really got rid of Trump, which brings us to the second element at play. A lot of the figures who were upset about Trump were members of the U.S. national security and foreign policy establishment who were offended by his relationship with Russia. They tended to be people who also still believe in a Cold War, pre-Iraq War vision of America as a global Superman that comes out of the sky to save lives and protect human rights. They’ve likely felt beleaguered for the last decade-plus not only by Trump, but by the failure of their broader ambitions as the U.S.’s chaotic, extremely costly occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq have given rise to anti-interventionist movements on both the right and left.