The paper explores how the flamboyantly thuggish behavior of the Putin regime in the international arena, the Cold War legacy, and the failures of the mainstream “diversity” ideology of the American establishment contributed the emergence of the paranoid narrative about the “Russian Collusion” in the US domestic politics between 2016 and 2021. First, the author argues that, being shell-shocked by a sudden victory of the unvetted populist presidential candidate, the Washington establishment turned to the external conspiratorial explanation of the Trump success instead of analyzing domestic sources of the Democrats’ defeat. Second, it is suggested that the cry racism tactics, which the left and liberal mainstream had successfully used to morally disarm their opponents, was failing as applied to Trump, who rejected the apology tactics and preached aggressive civic nationalism. Under these circumstances, the “Russian Collusion” narrative spontaneously emerged in the left-liberal thought collective as an additional handy tool to topple down the “illegitimate” president.