Opinion | Trump Isn’t the Only One With Conspiracy Theories

President Trump’s impeachment is the result of a conspiracy theory. Democrats and other supporters of the charges against Mr. Trump might be reluctant to accept that labeling. But a conspiracy theory is not necessarily crackpot or wrong: If the conspiracy is real, the theory may be correct.

Democrats are certain that President Trump, his personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani and others really did conspire to get the government of Ukraine to open an investigation that would embarrass Joe Biden and thereby influence the 2020 presidential election.

Not a single House Republican was persuaded by this theory to vote for impeachment. A conspiracy, after all, is about not only acting in secret but also doing so for an illicit purpose. What President Trump and his associates did was not a crime in itself, but it could have been an abuse of power. Rival parties, however, can interpret almost anything their opponents do as an abuse of power — and almost anything their own side does as innocent. Democrats had an obvious predisposition to find the president culpable; his own party had an equally obvious predisposition not to do so.

The combative attitude that Mr. Trump displays not only toward Democrats but also toward the media and much of America’s own intelligence community may be an expression of his personality. But it is also his way of fighting back against what he perceives as a commonality of culture and interest, if not an outright conspiracy, on the part of those who object to the new course he aims to set in American politics — in everything from international relations and trade policy to immigration and law enforcement.

The Trump years have seen rather too many conspiracy theories and counter-theories, when the reality is simply that President Trump and his voters want an America and a world that is very different from those their opponents want.

On the margins, one ex-Republican voted to impeach the president; two Democrats, one of whom switched parties the next day, voted against both articles of impeachment, while a third voted for the first article but against the second. Tulsi Gabbard, a Democrat running for president who nonetheless find some support among antiwar Republicans, marked her vote as “present.” Even these marginal cases reveal something of the overlap between party and a willingness to believe in the plot the Democrats laid out. Those who don’t fit neatly into the parties fit less neatly into the impeachment vote, too.

If Republicans did not subscribe to the conspiracy theory behind the case for impeachment, they nonetheless have some conspiracy theories of their own, as does President Trump. The same July 25 phone call between President Trump and President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine that led a whistle-blower to allege that Mr. Trump was trying to get a foreign government to meddle in the 2020 election also revealed a belief on President Trump’s part in a different kind of alleged conspiracy involving an American company, CrowdStrike. He asked Mr. Zelensky, apparently referencing the unsupported theory, to look into whether a computer server once belonging to the Democratic National Committee had wound up in Ukraine as part of a cover-up, aided by the company, of Ukraine’s role in a 2016 hack of D.N.C. computers. (CrowdStrike investigated that hack and concluded, as most authorities did, that it was carried out by Russia.)

There is no evidence to support that theory, but the president seems to be sincere. Why would he believe the Crowdstrike-Ukraine story anyway? Presumably because it fits into a wider theory that Democrats and elements of the United States intelligence community conspired to sabotage Mr. Trump’s 2016 campaign and thereafter his presidency. Mr. Trump has made clear he believes that F.B.I. investigations into alleged ties between his campaign associates and Russia were unjustified.

Democrats might have framed impeachment not about whether Mr. Trump wanted to solicit foreign interference in the 2020 campaign but whether he is too ready to buy into false conspiracy theories. That would not be a crime in itself, but it could be a serious enough matter to drive an impeachment effort, which is, after all, not a legal proceeding but a political one.

Quite apart from CrowdStrike or the lost contents of the private email server that Hillary Clinton used when she was secretary of state, President Trump is not wrong to question the investigations that have been directed against him and his associates and to wonder what role partisan innuendo played in supporting those investigations. In 2016, Mr. Trump’s political enemies sought private intelligence — “opposition research” — that might damage his campaign, and one dossier purporting to connect Mr. Trump and his campaign to Russia that was put together by a former British spy, Christopher Steele, did play a role in F.B.I. requests for authority from the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to wiretap the Trump campaign adviser Carter Page.

Intelligence agencies are meant to look for conspiracies, and in a sense they are conspiracies themselves. (Whether their activities are illicit depends in part on what exceptions to normal legal and moral rules you’re willing to make in the name of an assumed greater good.)

There is a great deal to be concerned about when the barriers between politics and intelligence break down, and the mixture of elements involved in giving birth to the conspiracy theory that Mr. Trump and his campaign were tools of the Kremlin is troubling. Those elements include an intelligence community and foreign-policy elite predisposed to view as subversive dissent from their own traditional views on the proper relationship between the United States and states like Russia; opposition research firms whose roles in blackening reputations are little known or understood by the public; foreign intelligence operatives, past or present, like Mr. Steele, who may not be bound by the norms that apply to Americans with intelligence backgrounds; and a national media that may be biased against Republicans and in favor of the opinions of their sources in government and intelligence.

That Mr. Trump’s agenda should be controversial and strongly opposed by those who disagree with him is to be expected. Sharp disagreements are not just proper but essential to a robust democratic system. However, especially where a transformative figure like Mr. Trump is concerned, it is important for those who resist the changes he would like to bring about to recognize that his sincere intentions are explanation enough for what he is doing. He does not have to be a Russian asset to do the things he is doing.

Political enemies will naturally impugn one another’s motives. They can do that, holding their foes to be wrong and even wicked, without imagining that they are wrong or wicked only because they are part of a conspiracy behind the scenes. But even where intelligence is concerned, this season of impeachment would be a good occasion to remember the most serious lessons of Watergate. Richard Nixon’s personal misdeeds paled in comparison to the intelligence community abuses uncovered by the Senate’s Church Committee and the new spirit of suspicion about secret agencies’ domestic activities, many of which were illegal and some of which were extraordinary abuses of human rights.

Conspiracy theories have been a feature of American politics since the beginning, as has the specter of foreign interference in our elections — originally a reason to be vigilant against French and British influence. But the Trump years have been clouded by too many conspiracy theories and not enough open debate about differing visions for the country. These differences are the legitimate stuff of politics, and they are best worked out at the ballot box, because no investigation or impeachment can resolve them.