Beware the paranoid style of Donald Trump's politics
Many of the more than 13,000 false or misleading claims tallied by The Washington Post's running count involved his various conspiracy theories, from his early bogus challenge to Barack Obama's birth certificate to the Post's recently added category: "Ukraine probe," which already has topped 250 entries.
But as Trump, under pressure of possible impeachment, appears to have ramped up the pace of his disinformation, I have begun to wonder: Could he actually believe his own bull jive?
For example, Trump pushes for yet another probe of Hillary Clinton's email server and CrowdStrike. That's the cybersecurity company that conducted a forensic examination of the DNC's servers after the 2016 hacking that U.S. intelligence agencies and the Mueller report say was conducted by Russians, a conclusion Trump prefers not to reach.
"I would like you to find out what happened with this whole situation with Ukraine," Trump told Zelenskiy, "they say CrowdStrike."
He appeared to be referencing a debunked conspiracy theory that CrowdStrike was owned by a Ukrainian, which it was not, and that the company was hiding a server holding missing Clinton emails, a claim that also has been debunked.
It's no surprise that the debunking doesn't stop Trump from spreading unsupported dirt on his opponents. He's done that before. But does he believe it too?
And how about his top appointees, Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and Attorney General William Barr? Do their actions in pursuing Trump's leads -- or misleads -- indicate, they, too, have embraced the paranoid plot theories?
Perhaps the impeachment hearings will tell us. Trump describes the long-honored ambassadors, intelligence community and other officials who have come forward to testify as "deep state" liberals, "never Trumper" conservatives and that old standby, "human scum." Charming.
I call them heroes. The danger of paranoid politics doesn't come from "men with profoundly disturbed minds," Hofstadter warned. Rather, it is "the use of paranoid modes of expression by more or less normal people that makes the phenomenon significant." When we make irrational fears seem normal, at least half of the battle for good governance is lost.
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(E-mail Clarence Page at cpage@chicagotribune.com.)
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