Donald Trump began assailing stories about Russia’s effort to aid his 2016 election even before he took office as president. A few weeks after the election was over, the first reports about that interference emerged, prompting Trump — smarting over having lost the popular vote — to disparage the idea that his victory was a function of anything other than his own aptitude. When BuzzFeed published the dossier of reports compiled by former British intelligence officer Christopher Steele, Trump’s fury escalated. The Russia allegations were a “WITCH HUNT,” he wrote for the first time that same day. On the day following, he suggested that intelligence agencies had released the document, an act akin to “living in Nazi Germany.”
Over time, a pattern emerged. Trump would make broad claims about how investigations into Russian interference — and, we later learned, contacts between his campaign team and Russian actors — were contrived to damage him personally. His allies would then scramble to prove him right either in the abstract or to validate the specific claims he’d made, however loosely they could.
And over and over and over those efforts to cast Trump as the victim of a plot aimed at undermining his candidacy or his presidency came up short.
Two things bear mentioning at the outset. It is true that the investigation into Russian interference and possible overlap with Trump’s campaign team suffered from flaws and errors. It’s quite possible that no massive investigation could...
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