This is why you CAN NOT simply view this with a focus on Trump. You must understand the big picture: there is a clear relationship not just between Russian interests and Trump; there is a clear relationship between Russian oligarchy and the Republican party, which represents the billionaire class.
Of course Trump represents a kind of existential threat in and of himself. People have repeatedly looked at Trump as a kind of caricature, which is why people have repeatedly underestimated him. It is absolutely true that his ignorance abounds when it comes to the Constitution, foreign affairs, economics, and all the things that we would expect a president to know, or at least take an interest in learning quickly. And for that reason many people have written him off as being dangerous because of his idiocy, and I won’t disagree with that. But Donald Trump is, by nature, an authoritarian, who behaves the way any authoritarian leader anywhere on the planet would behave, and that is something you cannot afford to underestimate or write off and dismiss as good for a few Saturday Night Live laughs. This is deadly serious business we are talking about here. Trump may be ignorant as sin, but over his lifetime he has studied how human networks and how power among people works - he understands power. He understands who has power and who doesn’t, and he understands how to grab power and use it as a weapon. He may not understand the machinery of the Constitution, but on a primitive level, he understands the human animal, and for that reason, he is extremely dangerous.
But referring back to the subject about which Ruth May writes, Trump is also dangerous because he is an agent of chaos. Putin was probably as surprised as the rest of us that Trump actually won against Hillary Clinton, but even if he fell short, Putin’s intelligence operations and foreign policy specialists had been studying the United States for years and he knew that a strong Trump campaign organized around certain types of nationalistic themes could disrupt American democracy. Putin knew he couldn’t defeat the US externally; he sought to make us bleed internally, which is why he has used his network of oligarchs to support the likes of Cocaine Mitch, because somewhere along the way, he spotted a weakness, and that weakness is that Republicans identify with oligarchy – A LOT.
Putin must have also realized somewhere along the way that even in free societies, tribalism can work, because tribalism relates to questions about perceptions of identity, security, equality. Putin realized that a lot of conservative white Americans tend to value their own freedom but not necessarily everyone else’s, and that is something that could be exploited. Understand that Putin will push the Republicans to drive this wedge much, much further than where it is now, because Putin has seen how polarization can tear societies to pieces. They, like the rest of us, saw how Milosevic and Karadzic turned the former Yugoslavia into an ethnic bloodbath, which is why the Russians have invested in a ethno-nationalist propaganda machine there today.
I’m afraid our problems run much, much deeper than just Trump. We have a Russian oligarchy with nation-state power that is essentially trying to destroy American democracy so that things like the Magnitsky Act and territorial integrity become essentially unenforceable. They have infiltrated our political system in a major way, and they have probably infiltrated our political system and even our national security apparatus in ways we cannot begin to imagine.