For decades the American far right has depended on conspiracy theories to explain why the nation keeps adopting progressive policies of which they disapprove.

Sen. Joseph McCarthy famously argued in 1951 that the World War II hero Gen. George C. Marshall, who had been both Harry Truman’s secretary of state and then secretary of defense, had made decisions that helped the Soviet Communists in their drive to dominate the world. McCarthy did not go as far as branding Marshall a traitor, but he did charge that Marshall—a great war hero who helped lead the planning of D-Day and had been Time Magazine’s Man of the Year in 1943—led “a conspiracy so immense and an infamy so black as to dwarf any previous venture in the history of man.”

Were old Joe McCarthy still with us he would be in awe of the lengths to which Donald Trump and his GOP and “conservative” lackeys have gone to discredit their perceived Democratic enemies. Each day Trump ups the ante by openly seeking the help of foreign governments (Russia, Ukraine and now China) to take action to destroy his main political rival in 2020, former Vice-President Joe Biden. 

He has also made it clear what he thinks of those Democrats, especially Rep. Adam Schiff, chair of the House Intelligence Committee, who are daring to begin an impeachment inquiry and to ask all the right questions. The latest nonsense the president has come up with is to argue that it was Ukraine, not Putin’s Russia, that hacked the DNC in 2016—all without any evidence whatsoever indicating that might have happened.

Trump is now reactivating and trafficking a theory that started after his election, but that was left to fringe elements on the right and largely ignored. This is the belief that Trump’s opponents, most coming from the camp of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama supporters, and their holdovers still sitting in major government positions in various agencies, are using their positions to slowly undertake a coup d’état, meant to remove from power the legally elected president and destroy his administration.