You may have watched Donald Trump speak directly into a camera and ask Russia for some specific help to win the 2016 election and wondered, "What the hell is going on here?"

So did Australian diplomat Alexander Downer. That's because Downer knew that at least one member of the Trump campaign had advance knowledge Russia might have a lot of emails incriminating Hillary Clinton.

The Australians reached out to the FBI. The investigation into Trump's campaign ties to Russia began. And what the FBI found was a bunch of guys trying to rip off Donald Trump.

But Donald Trump's narcissism turned those guys trying to rip him off into something else. As Marcy Wheeler shows in this Ball of Thread, Trump's narcissism turned the FBI's investigation into people trying to monetize their access to Trump into an attack on him personally.

Thus was born the conspiracy theory that has become a defining theme of Trump's 2024 campaign and life–war on the "deep state."

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