The Guardian is running a story - not as of this moment picked up by major American outlets - that purports to have internal Kremlin documents from 2016 that show Putin directing Russian intelligence agencies to help Trump win. The leaked documents appear to be genuine, but it's always best to be skeptical of anything coming out of Moscow.
The documents describe Trump as an "impulsive, mentally unstable and unbalanced individual who suffers from an inferiority complex." Check...check...check. It also claims that they have kompromat material on him. The Pee Tape is real people! This meeting took place a few weeks before the DNC hack. The article reads:
A Trump win “will definitely lead to the destabilisation of the US’s sociopolitical system” and see hidden discontent burst into the open, it predicts.
In some ways this feels like a post hoc manufactured document. It's just SOOOOO spot-on in its depiction of what happened from 2016 onwards that it feels a little too neat. On the other hand, people were saying Trump was manifestly unfit for office in 2016 in America, so...
Whether or not Russia tilted the election to Trump is unknowable. The 2016 election was so close that it's certainly very probable that any influence Russian intelligence exerted on the electorate through media and social media manipulation could have thrown just enough votes to Trump in Pennsylvania, Michigan and Wisconsin (a total of about 75,000 votes across those three states). The leaked document also shows that Russia understood how fractured our politics were and how Trump's election would make it even worse. Again, that's part of how "too pat" this leaked document is.
The problem, of course, is that even if the Kremlin were to come out an admit they did it, it wouldn't effect the members of Cult 45. If anything, Trump's election and the allegations of Russian aid have moved numerous factions in the Republican Party into a soft collusion with fucking Russia.
The Republican Party's war on democracy does not stop at the voting booth.
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