If you are surprised to find out that Russia was interfering in the election, trying to influence voters in favor of Donald Trump, then I have a question for you: What rock were you hiding under for the last 18 months?
On social media, the pro-Russia propaganda coming out of the Trump corner has been relentless for well over a year. Conservatives resisting Trump during the primaries ran into and remarked on this repeatedly, finding at various times a combination of either useful-idiot white nationalists (the so-called alt-right) or suspiciously foreign-sounding voices, or both at the same time, stridently defending and praising Russian President Vladimir Putin and Trump in the same breath.
What got more attention at the time was the overt racism of many of these “deplorables,” from well before the Iowa caucuses. But the pro-Russia lean among them was also evident. Given Putin’s propensity to kill journalists and silence political opponents through both lethal and non-lethal means, this is not some esoteric matter, it’s quite serious.
To this day, when I reference Russia’s invasion of the Crimea on social media, my replies fill up with trolls of varying degrees of English proficiency, responding with (for example) clips from the Russia Today propaganda network, insisting that there was no invasion. This is, of course, the official Russian government line on their invasion of Crimea, which bears no resemblance to fact. That’s just one example, but the point is that the pro-Russian astroturfing of social media throughout the election was pretty hard to miss if you paid any attention, and it all testified to an official and well-funded effort.
Nor could Trump’s own role in all this be overlooked, because Russia’s support for him was overtly reciprocated. He displayed an inexplicable unwillingness to criticize or even acknowledge the validity of others’ criticisms of Putin, even when it was in his political interest to do so. For example, during the debates, Hillary Clinton threw him a softball more than once by talking about how she had “stood up” to Putin. The easy reply — a version of which Mike Pence did actually deliver during the vice presidential debate — was that such “standing up” was evidently completely effective in curbing Russian aggression during President Obama’s term in office.
But no. Not only could Trump not use this to his political advantage, he couldn’t even acknowledge Putin’s infamous and well-documented role in shooting down a civilian passenger airliner during the conflict in Ukraine.
For a lot of us, Trump’s creepy obsession with Russia figured somewhere in our top-ten list of reasons not to vote for the guy. And that could be true of a large share of the 5 million Americans who voted for one of the two right-leaning alternatives, to say nothing of the unknown number of persuadable Republican voters in coastal suburbs who went for Clinton instead.
Overall, it’s possible the Russians’ “help” backfired, just not enough to cost him the election. Or who knows, maybe it made him president. I think a case can be made either way.
In electoral terms, the likely Russian hacking of the Democratic National Committee and John Podesta was clearly more useful to Trump than these other forms of Russian propaganda. WikiLeaks denies there’s a connection to Rusian intelligence, but there’s a pretty solid consensus on where these revelations are coming from, either directly or indirectly. The DNC hack hurt Democratic unity to some degree. The Podesta hack hurt Clinton on net, although there were no smoking guns in there — surely it didn’t hurt her as much as the criminal investigation into her State Department emails, and especially the report that the FBI released on her interrogation going into the Labor Day weekend.
Some people point to allegations, denied by the Republican National Committee, that it too was hacked but that no documents were released. This seems not to matter if we’ve already accepted the obvious, that Russia specifically tried to exert influence on Trump’s behalf.
What did the Russians get for their investment in the American election of 2016? We’re still finding out. I always believed they simply wanted to help elect a compromised, weak president. Given their approach, the success of their operation did not necessarily depend on Trump actually winning, even if it was their preferred outcome. Either they would end up with Trump or with a significantly weakened President Clinton — a win-win for Putin.
Trump followed up on this CIA acknowledgement by floating a trial balloon for a potential Secretary of State nominee with ties to Putin — a very Trumpian double-down. We will see how serious Senate Republicans were about all their complaints that Obama was overly obeisant to Putin (and to Iran for that matter) based on how they handle this confirmation. (Of course, that’s assuming Trump isn’t doing some kind of dramatic head-fake.)
Beyond actual policy outcomes, there is also clear evidence in the polling that the Russian government bought itself good will among Republican voters. This is a very bad thing. Republicans were actually much more skeptical of Putin than Democrats in 2014. By August 2016 their feelings toward him had become significantly less negative, shifting from a net minus-66 to just a net minus-27. This is especially disturbing at a time when the U.S. needs a clear mind in plotting its path forward in Syria, and when the weakness of Russia’s economy could motivate Putin to engage in still more unprovoked aggression.
In sum, I don’t understand how anyone is acting like they just now realized Russia tried to help Trump win. But I don’t blame anyone for being upset about it. It’s been rather annoying to watch this happen under our noses for more than a year now.
