No one is sure where President Trump got the idea that the Democratic National Committee's hacked server was hidden in Ukraine. As the impeachment saga unfolds, even the president's most ardent defenders, from Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana to Secretary of State Mike Pompeo, would rather talk about quid pro quos or revive the discredited claim that Ukraine, not Russia, interfered in the 2016 United States presidential election—anything to avoid discussing an evidence-free case that borders on lunacy. In her powerful testimony before the House Intelligence Committee, Fiona Hill, a former White House foreign policy adviser, characterized the story of the “missing” server as one of the fictions propagated by Russia's security services, and Trump's own staff had made a point of debunking it for the president. Nevertheless, in his fateful phone call of July 25, when the president asked Ukraine's newly elected president to “do us a favor” and track down the DNC server, U.S. foreign policy was officially replaced by a conspiracy theory.
As tends generally to be the case with most of the overheated conspiracy theories lighting up the internet and our political culture at large, the story of the Ukraine-based server is something of an urban legend for the digital age—caroming across our badly warped systems of news delivery from some great Oz-like font of right-wing misinformation, and just as abruptly alighting on our president's diplomatic to-do list. Internet anonymity hides the identities of those behind the curtain who push this and scores of other coordinated assaults on consensual reality, from the insane anti-Semitic libels that inspire armed young men to march into synagogues and open fire, to the unhinged speculations of the mysterious “Q” who posts cryptic messages revealing Trump's secret war against a cabal of pedophiles in the American government and Hollywood.
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