THE POLITICAL CULTURE: NATIONALIST PARANOIA RISING.

• Author: Walker, Jesse

DONALD TRUMP'S VERY first campaign speech fanned fears of foreign subversion: Mexico, he suggested, was deliberately dumping its criminals on our side of the border. A year after he became president, many Democrats have found it convenient to challenge him by... fanning fears of foreign subversion. It's a sign of the Trumpian times that so much of the "resistance" can't resist the rise of paranoid nationalism.

The problem here isn't that Democrats are investigating Trump and his cronies' possible conflicts of interest in the former Soviet Union. It's always good to keep an eye on any signs of public corruption, and the president's circle has certainly done business with more than its share of sleazy operators, from Russia to Turkey to New Jersey.

What's ugly is the narrative that's grown up around the investigation, one where Vladimir Putin is an omnipotent puppet-master, where attempts to reduce tensions with the Kremlin are innately suspicious, where Moscow's low-budget propaganda ploys are not just one more set of signals in the cacophony of American politics but an alien force ripping the U.S. apart. It's one thing to look for ways officials may have broken the law; it's quite another to encourage a new cold war or to call for controls on...