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.

If Russia magically stopped existing before 2016, we’d still have Trump

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".

Of course you do.

Once we isolate key people, we look for people we know are in their upstream -- people that they read posts from, but who themselves are less influential. (This uses the same social media graph built before.) We then either start flame wars with bots to derail the conversations that are influencing influential people (think nonsense reddit posts about conspiracies that sound like Markov chains of nonsense other people have said), or else send off specific tasks for sockpuppets (changing this wording of an idea here; cause an ideological split there; etc).

The goal is to keep opinions we don't want fragmented and from coalescing in to a single voice for long enough that the memes we do want can, at which points they've gotten a head start on going viral and tend to capture a larger-than-otherwise share of media attention.

(All of the stuff above is basically the "standard" for online PR (usually farmed out to an LLC with a generic name working for the marketing firm contracted by the big firm; deniability is a word frequently said), once you're above a certain size.)

https://archive.is/PoUMo

from Bannon:

“The opposition party is the media,” Steve Bannon, who helped run Trump’s 2016 campaign, told PBS Frontline five years ago. “And the media can only — because they’re dumb and they’re lazy — they can only focus on one thing at a time.”

So the solution, per Bannon? Overwhelm them.

“All we have to do is flood the zone,” he said. “Every day we hit them with three things. They’ll bite on one, and we’ll get all of our stuff done, bang, bang, bang. These guys will never — will never be able to recover. But we’ve got to start with muzzle velocity.”

https://www.npr.org/2025/02/07/nx-s1-5289315/trump-week-in-review

The best defense is to call them out on it and then walk away. They'll downvote the shit out of you, but who tf cares about upvotes and downvotes. If someone is getting downvoted heavily, read what they said carefully before piling on.