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If Russia magically stopped existing before 2016, we'd still have Trump. He's a homegrown phenomenon. There was and still is lot of resentment of establishment politics since the '08 collapse. Almost all the "recovery" from that was concentrated in the top 20% of income earners.
Trump is a crook helping himself and his rich friends, but he presents himself on television as anti-establishment. Gameshow Host President plus the American Public. You really need 80% foreign intervention to do the math on that one?
That's because the campaign to get him, or someone like him, electable started in the 80s.
That's one of the things the West still can't wrap its collective head around - russia doesn't operate like western countries. Its long-term goals are not "how can we bring plumbing and indoor toilets to our citizens in the next 40 years", but rather "how can we sow misinformation and discontent in the West to divide nations and cause them to tumble into chaos".
I'm sure the estate of Tom Clancy is still looking for new ghost writers.
It's always funny how literally ALL ex-Soviet and USSR-satellite states are saying the exact same thing since the 90s, and the entire West goes "lol, don't be dramatic". And then russia does exactly what the West was warned about, and the West goes "huh, who could've seen that coming?"
It's tiring.
I mean they can both be true. The collapse of American education and media laid the groundwork for Trump. For him to even come anywhere close to power reveals a stark and horrifying collapse of everything that's supposed to keep us understanding reality and keep the whole train on the rails. But, also, Russia's formidable power at narrative-shaping in Western countries is a factor is the proximate cause of how bad it is. We haven't even really got our heads around the nature of how bad it really is, having the whole top levels of government hollowed out and destroyed like they currently are being. We'll find out the next time there is an actual crisis.
Do you really think Russia has done more to "shape the narrative" than Rupert Murdoch has? I'm sure they've got battalions of soldiers on Facebook or Tweeting tweets or whatever, but that's got to amount to chump change when compared against 24 hour Fox News.
I do think Fox News has more power, but Russia's goal is unapologetically simply to do as much damage as possible. Fox is trying to hand America over to their friends and destroy their opposition and if they do some damage, oh well, but they're trying to still have a working country to hand over to the friends. Russia is simply trying to steer the bus off the cliff.
Intentions have little barring on the effects of actions. The Murdoch media empire may not intend to destabilize english speaking nations, but that's very much what it's doing.
Yeah, pretty much.
"The system itself could not have intended this in the beginning, but in order to sustain itself it was compelled to go all the way.” ―Milton Sanford Mayer, They Thought They Were Free: The Germans 1933-45