Mr. Graham said he had also been highly skeptical when Mr. Trump insisted last year that Mr. Obama had tapped his phones in Trump Tower, a stunning assertion for which he offered no proof.
“I thought, ‘Well, that doesn’t seem right to me,’” Mr. Graham said last week. But, he noted, it was later revealed that one of Mr. Trump’s former campaign associates, Carter Page, had in fact been under surveillance. And on “Spygate,” the senator added, “There seems to be something to this one. I want to find out: Did it happen? Is there a good reason?”
Senator John Cornyn, Republican of Texas, distanced himself from the president’s sinister language, but not necessarily the questions he had raised about the informant. “I wouldn’t describe it the way he described it,” Mr. Cornyn said. “Confidential informant? Spy? I guess he can use his own words.”
Then, like many lawmakers who once denounced the president’s assaults on law enforcement agencies, Mr. Cornyn gave the president a level of validation, saying it was worth knowing what the F.B.I.’s “motivation” was in the inquiry into the Trump campaign.
Mr. Trump is not the first public figure to charge that he is the subject of a shadowy plot. Mrs. Clinton memorably declared during impeachment proceedings against her husband, Bill Clinton, that they were the victims of a “vast, right-wing conspiracy,” although the president himself never used the word at the time.
Mr. Meacham pointed to an 1866 speech at a tumultuous moment of post-Civil War Reconstruction, in which President Andrew Johnson said that his political enemies were plotting to assassinate him. President Richard M. Nixon believed that an elitist cabal led by Ivy League-educated denizens of Georgetown and Washington Post journalists was working secretly to bring him down. Both presidents, Mr. Meacham noted, were self-made men who harbored deep insecurities, not unlike the current Oval Office occupant.
Erick Erickson, the founder of the conservative website RedState, who once described Mr. Trump as a “walking, talking National Enquirer,” said the president’s invented stories also speak to the public’s desire to have an easy explanation for events it cannot control.
