The Real Goal Of Russian Election Interference

-Source-Outsidethebeltway- The Washington Posts Aaron Blake argues that Vladimir Putins goal in interfering in the 2016 election wasnt so much to get President Trump elected as it was to sow chaos in the American political process: There has been plenty of fighting over exactly what Vladimir Putins goal was in interfering in the 2016 U.S. election. The intelligence community has concluded he favored Donald Trump but Trump has publicly cast doubt on this and members of his administration have regularly sought to obscure it. In a way this all misses the point. The even-bigger motivation wasnt necessarily about Trump personally; it was about destabilizing the American system of government. Russian efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represent the most recent expression of Moscows longstanding desire to undermine the US-led liberal democratic order" begins the January 2017 report from the U.S. intelligence community. Trump by virtue of his controversial style and tendency to destroy societal norms simply became the most obvious conduit arguably a near-perfect one in fact. And this week showed just what a success it all has been for Putin. Nearly every week we feel as though weve crossed the Rubicon but this week outflanked the vast majority of them. The president of the United States publicly suggested his attorney general shut down an investigation of the president of the United States. Tensions between President Trump and the media boiled over at a couple Trump rallies and the White House seemed to double down on its emerging campaign to tag the media not just as fake news" but the enemy of the American people." And a growing number of Trump supporters at those same rallies seemed to be embracing a particularly bizarre baseless and dangerous conspiracy theory known as QAnon" which could soon with just one tweet from our conspiracy-theorist president explode. Large swaths of the country have decided that Trump is guilty of collusion and obstruction of justice. Many have also decided he is beholden to Putin that the Russian president does have that much-discussed kompromat on Trump. There are certainly much more innocent explanations including that Trump is merely the worlds most politically powerful contrarian a guy who cant be controlled and who is bent on getting and keeping the countrys attention no matter what it takes. But the practical implications are really the same: Whatever his reasons we have a president who is quite happy to destabilize the system of American government and indeed thinks thats the goal in many ways. And destabilizing it he is.