Some people think it really exists

Over the weekend, Trump flunky (and pretend White House Chief of Staff) Mick Mulvaney went on TV to defend his embattled boss. He explained:

... the president had mentioned for me time to time about the DNC server. He had mentioned the DNC server to other people publicly.

Fox New transcript

What in the world is he talking about?

Mulvaney seems to be referring a piece of fully refuted claptrap that has become deeply embedded in Trump's mind and hence in the imaginations of his adherents. Because his personal pathology requires him to believe he won a magnificent electoral victory in 2016, he can't accept that Russian hacking (and divisive online activity) gave him a boost. So somebody else must be to blame when the FBI, counter-intelligence investigators, Robert Mueller, and reputable journalists at fact-based outlets, all conclude that Russian operatives hacked and weaponized the communications of the Democratic National Committee. He has settled on a piece of nonsense connected to Ukraine.

In an April 2017 interview with The Associated Press, President Trump suddenly began talking about the hack of the Democratic National Committee a year earlier, complaining that the F.B.I. had not physically examined the compromised server.

“They brought in another company that I hear is Ukrainian-based,” the president said.

“CrowdStrike?” the surprised reporter asked, referring to the California cybersecurity company that investigated how Russian government hackers had stolen and leaked Democratic emails, disrupting Hillary Clinton’s campaign.

“That’s what I heard,” Mr. Trump resumed. “I heard it’s owned by a very rich Ukrainian; that’s what I heard.”

Scott Shane, New York Times

This is rooted in a technological illiteracy that Trump shares with too much of his generation and the flock of incompetent second raters in ugly ties that he surrounds himself with. He can't imagine that nonexistent data which he wants to find was never located in a physical box hidden somewhere. It must be hidden in Ukraine (probably by some oligarch who will turn out to be a buddy of Joe Biden.)

In real life the DNC used cloud servers for its data and the Crowdstrike company gave the FBI an electronic copy of the hacked server -- the only form in which it ever really existed.

Hence much follows: other tech illiterates like Rudy Giuliani and Bill Barr go chasing around after phantoms their boss believes in. Maybe they do too? And Trump remains convinced he's onto a deep state conspiracy against his magnificence. He's a convincing salesman for the gullible on right wing media. And the rest of us don't even get the concept adequately to refute it.

This sort of thing will continue as long as so much of our lives depend on technical communication processes which we find more magical than reliable or simply normal. In our science-based civilization, we have normalized the counter-intuitive reality that the earth is round -- and we fly around it. Might we someday generally have similar confidence in our cyber environment? I don't feel confident that will be soon; we live in a season congenial to charlatans and fable generators.