President Trump isn’t just trying to change the subject; he’s also trying to rewrite history — or maybe I should say reality.

Earlier this month — while Trump was struggling to answer questions about his long friendship with Jeffrey Epstein — Tulsi Gabbard, the director of national intelligence, released a report purporting to show that senior Obama administration officials participated in a “treasonous conspiracy” in 2016 that was designed to hurt the incoming Trump administration.

Last week the Justice Department piled on. It announced that it was creating a “strike force” to “assess” Gabbard’s evidence and “investigate potential next legal steps.” For his part, Trump reposted a fake video depicting former President Barack Obama’s arrest.

And he’s kept on posting. Days later he reposted a meme that Photoshopped Obama into the infamous white Bronco from O.J. Simpson’s police chase in 1994, with JD Vance and Trump himself Photoshopped into police cars.

It’s tempting to write these developments off as nothing more than ploys to direct the base away from the ongoing Epstein saga by playing one of MAGA’s greatest hits: the claim that Trump was the victim of a witch hunt, that the establishment attempted to destroy him even before he began his first term.

For those who followed the Russia investigation in its many manifestations, Gabbard’s report was an obvious red herring. It hinged on the claim that there was “no indication of a Russian threat to directly manipulate the actual vote count.” But the actual vote count was never the basis for the allegations against Russia.

In fact, as John Brennan and James Clapper, two senior intelligence officials in the Obama administration, wrote in a Times Opinion guest essay on Wednesday, “Russian influence operations might have shaped the views of Americans before they entered the voting booth, but we found no evidence that the Russians changed any actual votes.”

In other words, the claim at the time was that Russia interfered with the election by attempting to stir up chaos in the American electorate through inflammatory social media posts and a hack-and-leak campaign that targeted the Democratic National Committee and senior Democratic officials.

All of this was true. It’s been acknowledged as true by a unanimous bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee report that remains the best single source for understanding both Russia’s efforts to influence the election and the Trump campaign’s contacts with Russians and suspected Russian agents and assets. When the report was produced, the Senate Intelligence Committee was run by Republicans, and the acting chairman was none other than Marco Rubio, now Trump’s secretary of state.

As Jeffrey Toobin explained in an Opinion guest essay last week, there is simply no credible legal or factual argument that Obama committed treason. The allegation is utterly ridiculous.

But calling it ridiculous doesn’t mean that it isn’t serious. Trump is in the midst of a vengeance campaign against his political enemies, and no one should have any confidence that this new Justice Department “strike force” will conduct its work with integrity. What would have shown integrity was for the department to reject — or at least ignore — Gabbard’s report.

The problems, however, go far beyond the possibility that the Justice Department might try to engineer specious, politically motivated indictments. The administration’s claims about the Russia investigation are designed to alter our understanding of history, to foster MAGA’s fake narrative of Trump and MAGA as perpetual victims of a maliciously corrupt “deep state.”

In fact, the response to the Russia story provided the template for how MAGA has responded to nearly every Trump scandal. And once you recognize the pattern, you can see it play out time and time again.

It comes in four distinct steps.

Step 1: Redefine the scandal on the terms most favorable to Trump. Sadly, parts of the media made this easy. In January 2017, days before Trump took office, BuzzFeed News published the so-called Steele dossier, a sloppy, rumor-filled piece of opposition research generated by a firm called Fusion GPS.

The dossier was full of lurid and fantastical claims against Trump, and BuzzFeed News did not verify its contents before publication. It detonated like a bomb. Some Trump opponents were too eager to believe its contents. For them, it seemed to confirm their worst fears. Trump’s supporters, in contrast, saw the release as confirming their worst suspicions about the media: that reporters and editors were willing — very willing — to publish fake news if that fake news harmed Trump.

Over time, however, the dossier became MAGA’s best friend. If the various Russia investigations couldn’t confirm the contents of the dossier, then there was no real scandal at all. Debunk the dossier and you debunk the Russia investigation.

Step 2 is simple — or at least it is to a certain kind of politician: Lie relentlessly. When you look back at the special counsel Robert Mueller’s final report, the dishonesty it reveals across the length and breadth of the Trump administration was breathtaking. According to the report, the Trump team lied when it said it had no contacts with Russia, and it lied about the reasons for firing James Comey, who was then the director of the F.B.I. It also found that Trump lied about trying to force his White House counsel to fire Mueller.

But because Trump was telling Republicans exactly what they wanted to hear, they believed the lies. A 2018 NBC News poll found that 76 percent of Republicans believed that Trump told the truth “all or most of the time.”

That brings us to Step 3: Ignore genuine concerns. The Senate Intelligence Committee report (again, remember that this was the product of a Republican-dominated committee) exposed an extraordinary amount of disturbing contacts between members of the Trump campaign and Russians or Russian assets.

Paul Manafort, Trump’s former campaign chairman, repeatedly communicated with Konstantin Kilimnik, whom the F.B.I. assessed as having “ties to Russian intelligence.” Manafort, the Senate report said, used encrypted apps to communicate with Kilimnik and engaged in a tactic called “foldering” (communicating through draft emails created in a shared account, rather than sending emails to a different inbox), appearing to conceal both the fact that Manafort was communicating with Kilimnik and the content of those communications.

As the report contends, Kilimnik may be one of the original sources for the MAGA conspiracy theory that Ukraine — not Russia — interfered in the election, with the aim of hurting Trump.

Manafort, Donald Trump Jr. and Jared Kushner, Trump’s son-in-law, met with a Russian lawyer with connections to the Kremlin on June 9, 2016, in Trump Tower, hoping to receive negative information about Hillary Clinton. Whether the meeting yielded any actionable information against Clinton does not alter the Trump team’s intent. They wanted to work with Russians against Clinton.

The report also claimed that WikiLeaks “actively sought, and played, a key role in the Russian influence campaign and very likely knew it was assisting a Russian intelligence influence effort” when it released hacked information from the Democratic National Committee, and that “staff on the Trump campaign sought advance notice about WikiLeaks releases, created messaging strategies to promote and share the materials in anticipation of and following their release, and encouraged further leaks.”

The committee also found that “Trump and senior campaign officials sought to obtain advance information about WikiLeaks’s planned releases through Roger Stone.” The report said that at the direction of “Trump and senior campaign officials” Stone “took action to gain inside knowledge for the campaign and shared his purported knowledge" with them “on multiple occasions.”

While Trump couldn’t recall talking to Stone about WikiLeaks, the committee said that it “assesses that Trump did, in fact, speak with Stone about WikiLeaks and with members of his campaign about Stone’s access to WikiLeaks on multiple occasions.”

This is a small portion of the evidence that the Trump campaign engaged in profoundly improper behavior during the campaign, and all of it was either denied or dismissed as inconsequential. In reality, however, these contacts weren’t just troubling; they foreshadowed Trump’s remarkable lenience toward Russia and his extraordinary hostility against Ukraine, a hostility that has only recently seemed to abate (for now).

Step 4 is key: Reverse the villains. For many Republicans, the real villain isn’t just the Obama administration; it’s also the F.B.I. and the Department of Justice. In MAGA’s telling, they blasted through governing law and regular procedures in an illegal quest to depose Trump.

This story is mostly false. Michael Horowitz, a former Justice Department inspector general who investigated the F.B.I.’s decision to open the investigation of Trump, found that it “had an authorized purpose” when it opened the investigation. In addition, he “did not find documentary or testimonial evidence that political bias or improper motivation influenced” the decision to open the investigation in the first place.

At the same time, however, he found a series of problems — serious problems — in the F.B.I. investigation, including reliance on the Steele dossier to secure FISA warrants, which allowed federal law enforcement to conduct electronic surveillance operations to investigate foreign intelligence threats, well after the F.B.I. knew or should have known its contents were unreliable.

Horowitz also found multiple significant errors in the F.B.I.’s FISA renewal applications, and he described in detail a series of improper contacts between the F.B.I. and a Justice Department attorney named Bruce Ohr. Ohr’s wife was an independent contractor with Fusion GPS during the 2016 campaign. Ohr retired from the Justice Department in 2020.

That’s not a complete accounting of the Justice Department’s missteps in the case, but none of it changes the facts surrounding the Trump campaign team’s contact with Russians. It should still trouble us all, regardless of party or ideology.

Trump has run this same playbook for more than eight years. Whether he was facing impeachment in 2019 over charges of threatening to hold back aid to Ukraine unless Ukraine investigated the Biden family or facing impeachment again over his effort to overturn the results of the 2020 election, the pattern is the same. It has worked on Republicans every single time.

It works because he’s telling them what they want to hear: Trump is not corrupt; his critics are. But for the first time since he announced his first campaign in June 2015, Trump’s team has told his base something many definitely did not want to hear — and very much did not expect: that the Epstein scandal is less expansive than they thought, that there was nothing to see here. He has been flailing ever since.

So it’s no surprise that he turned back to the “Russia hoax.” It was the first significant scandal of his administration, and the fight over the Mueller investigation helped bond Trump to his base.

But the real Russia hoax is the idea that there was nothing to investigate.

When the F.B.I. opened its initial investigation, it was doing exactly what it should have done. None of its subsequent mistakes, as egregious as they were, change that fundamental fact, and when Trump derisively says “Russia, Russia, Russia,” remember all the lies about his campaign team’s contacts with Russia.

And remember that even our nation’s foreign enemies will become Trump’s friends if they can help Trump defeat his American foes.

Some other things I did

In my Sunday column, I took a break from politics and wrote about a show I love, FX’s “The Bear.” Every season has been wonderful. Every season has moved me. But this season felt particularly poignant. Why? Because it showcased the remarkable healing power of genuine repentance:

It’s hard enough to live in a community — we are all inherently flawed, after all. Normal human failings create persistent frictions, and unless we learn to deal with and ameliorate that friction, even the best of friendships can sometimes fade.

But we’re living through something else, a furious anger in which it seems people actually want to end friendships, where they want to inflict pain with their words. It’s one way to demonstrate your commitment, your great and high ideological or religious or political calling. The cause demands it, and you serve the cause.

We create relational rubble and find that it’s hard to live in the ruins.

In Season 4, Carmy lives in those ruins, but he decides to rebuild. And he does so through the most powerful of human reactions to sin and loss: He repents.

But to understand the true importance of repentance, we have to know exactly what it is, and it is far more consequential than mere regret:

Let’s pause here for a moment and talk about the difference between regret and repentance. Regret is the sorrow we feel for the pain we cause or the consequences we experience. Repentance, by contrast, is active. It happens when we turn away from the behaviors that caused our regret.

Rarely has a television show more clearly demonstrated the difference than “The Bear.” Time and again, the words “I’m sorry” — the expression of regret — are met with skepticism, at best. Carmy says those words over and over again, and you can see his friends’ faces barely change. They want more than an apology.

In fact, the words “I’m sorry” can compound our pain if an apology isn’t accompanied by action. But when a person does make amends, his humility can possess enormous power.:

At a time of extraordinary fury, we all live in a degree of pain. We all live with regrets. But hope can come from unexpected places — and perhaps a show that features scallops, pastries and Chicago beef can also teach us that only repentance can heal our broken hearts.

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