Just yesterday I watched the BBC documentary HyperNormalisation from 2016, and it has completely changed the way I understand disinformation. I would recommend it to everyone.
The term hypernormalisation comes from a Soviet author, who used it to describe the sense in the late stage soviet union that nothing was real, nothing mattered, and nothing could ever change. When you know everything you're told is a lie and everything you do is effectively part of the lie, it becomes incredibly hard to create an effective opposition; everything exists within the framework of lies.
Putin perfected this political theatre in Russia, and Trump has taken Putin's strategies to the US. But the documentary argues that the west has been creating a "fake world" for much longer; a useful apolitical landscape where friends and enemies are clearly defined, and the complexity of the real world are conveniently left out. The overarching goal was the stability of the system; specifically, the balance of power between the US and the Soviets, and Kissinger's fucked up vision for international politics.
It explains, among other things, how Gaddafi could be our greatest enemy one day, BFF with Bush and Blair the next, and killed via an American drone strike the day after, all while western media expects us to completely accept the narrative.
It also talks about the development of cyberspace, the different visions for it, and how eventually it turned into algorithms feeding us distorted reflections of ourselves to the interest of anonymous third parties.
It's a long documentary, but I strongly recommend it. I think it captures some of the underlying problems that brought us to where we are today, and it gives a more honest description than pretending like everything was fine until Trump came along.
Watch it on archive.org or on Peertube (the instance seems somewhat unstable). Here's the Wikipedia article.