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office, firmly crossing his arms. “There’s no reason to even talk about it,” he said again, stubbornly. For his part, the president did not use, though he might have, the word “Kafkaesque.” He regarded the Russia story as senseless and inexplicable and having no basis in reality. They were just being sucked in. They had survived scandal during the campaign—the Billy Bush weekend—which virtually no one in Trump’s inner circle had thought they could survive, only to be hit by the Russia scandal. Compared to Pussy-gate, Russia seemed like the only-desperate-thing- left-gate. What seemed unfair now was that the issue still wasn’t going away, and that, incomprehensibly, people took it seriously. When at best it was ... nothing. It was the media. The White House had quickly become accustomed to media-led scandals, but they were also used to their passing. But now this one was, frustratingly, holding on. If there was any single piece of proof not just of media bias but of the intention of the media to do anything it could to undermine this president, it was—in the view of the Trump circle—this, the Russia story, what the Washington Post termed “Russia’s attack on our political system.” (“So terribly, terribly unfair, with no proof of one vote changed,” according to Conway.) It was insidious. It was, to them, although they didn’t put it this way, similar to the kind of dark Clinton-like conspiracies that Republicans were more wont to accuse liberals of—Whitewater, Benghazi, Email-gate. That is, an obsessive narrative that leads to investigations, which lead to other investigations, and to more obsessive no-escape media coverage. This was modern politics: blood-sport conspiracies that were about trying to destroy people and careers. When the comparison to Whitewater was made to Conway, she, rather proving the point about obsessions, immediately began to argue the particulars involving Webster Hubbell, a mostly forgotten figure in the Whitewater affair, and the culpability of the Rose Law Firm in Arkansas, where Hillary Clinton was a partner. Everybody believed their side’s conspiracies, while utterly, and righteously, rejecting the conspiracies leveled at them. To call something a conspiracy was to dismiss it. As for Bannon, who had himself promoted many conspiracies, he dismissed the Russia story in textbook fashion: “It’s just a conspiracy theory.” And, he added, the Trump team wasn’t capable of conspiring about anything. OK Ok The Russia story was—just two weeks into the new presidency—a dividing line with each side viewing the other as pushing fake news. The greater White House wholly believed that the story was an invented construct of weak if not preposterous narrative threads, with a mind-boggling thesis: We fixed the HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019957