Donald Trump could have blamed the Stay Puft marshmallow man.
It would have been as plausible.
Instead, he chose a 400-pound couch potato. One obese hacker.
In his first debate with Hillary Clinton in 2016, Trump shrugged off evidence of Russian cyber-sabotage of our elections, saying it could be “somebody sitting on their bed that weighs 400 pounds.”
His intent was to deceive, naturally. But Trump actually nudged up against the truth, there — except that the single obese figure he conjured was hundreds of obese figures, each employed by Russia.
Vladimir Putin has deployed the nerdy, couch-mounted might of Russia’s 1,000-employee Internet Research Agency to do what it can for Putin’s favorite son.
In 2016, aside from their hacking into the emails of the Democratic National Committee and snaking in and around state elections systems, the Russians mass-produced trolls, bots and fake messaging to benefit Trump.
Russia’s targets: low-information, low-motivation, on-the-fence individuals to lure to Trump or to discourage them from voting.
Brace yourselves for a redux. This time, however, in a new wrinkle, the Russians have created whole online publications that look like local newspapers.
They sound like the real thing: the “Chicago Chronicle.” The “New York News Daily.” The “D.C. Weekly.”
Included: sites conveying fake connections to cities like Little Rock, Ark., and Albuquerque.
The phony “Miami Chronicle” contains the claim that it’s served readers since 1937 (way back when Stalin was The Man).
These fake publications list bogus editorial personnel with American names and use phony filler “stories” to convey ordinary earnestness.
In between the filler is “news” that will convince the susceptible, just as it convinced “Moscow Marjorie” Taylor Greene, that Ukraine is run by Nazis and that its people thirst for Putin’s warm embrace.
Not surprisingly, the fake sites amplify good news for Trump and bad news for Joe Biden. One can assume they will ramp up the propaganda as November approaches.
Back to Trump’s “400-pound” hacker comment. He undoubtedly had been briefed by his own intelligence sources about their concern. This made his blow-off comments tacit encouragement of Russia’s attack on our election system.
Nonetheless, he said in the same breath, “We have to get very, very tough on cyber and cyber warfare. It’s a huge problem.”
Not, apparently, if the other side is on your side.
Speaking of U.S. intelligence, the stuff Trump pooh-poohed as president, the Washington Post recently reported on a secret Russian foreign policy document that shows that though Putin is on Trump’s side, he most assuredly is not on ours.
The document detailed the Russian Foreign Ministry’s plans to weaken its western adversaries, including the United States. Conquest of Ukraine, it said, would help redraw “the outlines of the future world order.”
The Post reports that a key objective, the document asserts, is to “facilitate the coming to power of isolationist right-wing forces in America.”
You mean the group Liz Cheney calls the “Putin Wing” in Congress?
Whether or not he has a clue about it, Donald Trump is a stalking horse for a comeback by a dramatically diminished one-time superpower.
The Internet Research Agency was the fruit of a diminished Russian global presence. So says the 2018 book “LikeWar: The Weaponization of Social Media,” by defense analysts Emerson Brooking and P.W. Singer.
They point out that Russia’s cyber war is the last resort for a nation that has lost its global oomph.
Looking on admiringly at how ISIS puffed up its globe presence by skillfully using the internet, desperate leaders of a cut-down-to-size Russia opted for “global information warfare,” the authors say.
Brooking and Singer write that Russians believe a “strong information offensive can have a strategic impact on a par with the release of an atomic bomb.”
Imagine: a couch potato to rule the world.
Longtime newspaperman John Young lives in Colorado. Email: jyoungcolumn@gmail.com.
