Why Donald Trump was the perfect candidate for Russia. And it's not just about debt or Kompromat.

[Tommy_Carcetti]

The Putin government--specifically via Putin's closest advisor Vladislav Surkov, who then passed it down to his army of online propagandists lead by the likes of Konstantin Rykov--revels in "post-truth."

Fact is fiction, fiction is fact, eventually it all becomes irrelevant and people will retreat to following a strong leader type.

Make an outrageous admission, and then in next breath deny you ever made such a claim. People won't know what to believe anymore.

Trump goes onto NBC, says he fired Comey because of the "Russia thing." He tells the Russian delegation the same thing in the Oval Office. Then later on down the road, he insists the Russia investigation played no role in his firing of Comey.

Trump declares "I love Wikileaks!" in front of a campaign crowd. And yet today, when asked about Assange, he claims he knows nothing about Wikileaks.

But his followers have been conditioned to the point where they don't care anymore.

Remember how George Bush Sr. once famously declared, "Read my lips, no new taxes." And then Bush ended up in the situation where he did raise taxes, and he lost a good deal of support over that?

Those days are long gone.

It's Post-Truth. It's been propagated by Russian operatives for a long time now, and it's infected our country.

[Grasswire2]

1. He was indeed the perfect vehicle for authoritarian takeover.

I gave my copy of Eric Hoffer's "True Believer" to a family member before Trump, but I need to get another copy. I keep thinking about it.

[murielm99]

6. I reread that not long ago. n/t

[mr_lebowski]

2. It wasn't just A campaign crowd, he mentioned Wikileaks over 130 times in front of crowds ...

Other than that minor point YES, this all sounds very correct.

Trump's personal pathology's made him the perfect choice for Russia and their worldwide propaganda efforts.

[CrispyQ]

3. His base thinks he's the Donald Trump in The Apprentice.

The one who can actually fire people to their faces, not the one who has someone else do it for him or does it via tweet. They are like him, in that they refuse to admit when they are wrong. Then there's the pleasure they get from pissing off the libs. You can't reason with these people, that's for sure.

[Lock individual1 up]

4. Yep. They would die for him, no matter how much pain

they would have to go through, and they'd just change their minds like a minute before actually dying for real.

[JI7]

9. a truly successful business person would never do a shitty reality show like the Apprentice

someone mentioned how it takes a lot of time to do the shows and the money isn't much for someone who claimed to be a multibillionaire.

[Beartracks]

12. So very true. n/t

[Maven]

5. And let's not forget the role that Fox News and social media have played.

There used to be trusted arbiters of what was true and not true.

That didn't benefit the counterfactual worldview of conservatives. Then, the right figured out that they could simply create their own arbiters of "truth" and give them a slick media platform and many, many people would believe it. Soon, the truth and lies would become simply two different viewpoints on the same subject.

Now, with social media, new arbiters of "truth" have emerged, multiplying the effect immeasurably and making the whole population susceptible to outside influence. To be a social media "influencer", you don't need to have credentials or journalistic methods. You just need a following and strong opinions. Having a large following is treated as credibility in itself.

Trump is a post-truth demagogue but it is the current media landscape that made his rise possible and that allows him to continue his lies with impunity.

[ananda]

7. Agree

The media and the Reep propaganda machine
can take advantage of susceptible and gullible
people..

[dalton99a]

8. And he knows exactly what he is doing

"I could stand in the middle of 5th Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn't lose voters"

[Mc Mike]

10. Also, they know he's an insane freak and habitual failure.

So they can just order their puppet to be himself, then sit back and watch the damage occur.

[Kashkakat v.2.0]

11. Read up on soviet disinformation & psy-ops methods - theyve been perfecting this for decades in

Russia, former soviet countries, Ukraine etc. in Europe, and in US via troll farms and possibly other avenues yet unknown.

The chaos, confusion and conflict is very much intentional - the goal is very much to get people fatigued, confused, unsure of whats going on and not trusting the media or anything they hear, and to erode foundations of democracy itself.

How much of Trumps behavior is him intentionally following a strategy, and how much is his mental disorder compelling him to sow discord and chaos... I dunno. Its likely both things are true..... it doesn't matter.... effect is the same. As we are now seeing .

I think this factor needs to be more widely known / discussed so that we more equipped to resist it.

BTW Im not saying that all of our current chaos and discord is the work Russian agents (aside from the documented troll factories) Likely its mostly our homegrown propagandist radicals who have learned from the masters.... its all readily accessible these days. Again it doesn't really matter - we just need to know that this really is a thing..... that its not just some isolated lunatic in the whitehouse.... there really is a concerted effort to discredit and destabilize our democracy.