In the end it turns out there was much hoopla about nothing, a giant psyop by the establishment powers that now want to earn your trust back.
Prior media would have been a lot harder to coerce by foreign agents. New social media are way easier to take advantage of as a foreign power.
For example, I'm able to participate in this debate without even being American. I have new reach and influence over Americans I never had before. How many people commenting here aren't American? Half the comments could be from Russians all we know.
That Trump didn't ask for their help doesn't mean that he didn't play into their hand.
In a strange way though, you can't dissociate them anymore. He could very well have won all by himself, hacked email or not, fake accounts or not, etc. But they did hack and leak her emails, and they did create fake accounts, and had troll farms targeted at American voters.
I can see the hesitancy to acknowledge that, because it could discredit your own win, but it's also a very interesting new scenario that didn't exist before, which is that foreign powers didn't have direct means of communication with such a large portion of your citizenry as we do now.
If I were to speak for the past, it was actually the US media that were one of the few to be able to reach into other countries populace through movies, books, games, and all that. But it was very hard for non-US media to reach Americans, and that's no longer the case.
If they're any good at what they do… :)
This HN thread is basically ground zero for pushing the 'Russiagate' set of arguments: namely, everything from Trump to QAnon and the antivaxxers are all totally organic and Russia didn't do any of it, in spite of their known tactics for seeding disparate opinion groups with chaos and disinformation to produce a state known as 'the Zone' where nobody knows what, if anything, is true or who is real anymore.
I've got to hand it to them, it is one hell of a tactic. It's somewhat less effective if you know it's one of their tactics. Rather than producing despair, it's downgraded to more 'fog of war' tactics. If you don't know about the tactic, despair is a more likely reaction.
With respect to your other boogie men: these have been litigated extensively in the public space as de minimus. Yet you casually conjure demons from ether.
Are you surprised that few find your method of argumentation or reasoning persuasive?
2. Most people in Russia do not speak English or do it poorly. Russian accent is very hard to hide even in writing. E.g. we don't have articles in our language, the whole concept of article is so foreign to us, that I, for example, just put them randomly, because even after years I can't understand why and where to use them. So it's easy to spot Russian comments.
3. There wasn't a single proof that Russia meddled in US elections, not even indirect evidence. It's mostly a bombardment of US media: "Russians did it" (and 100500 pages of gibberish without a single piece of evidence). Though there were no proofs, most people read only headlines and start to assume there was actual evidence. There wasn't any.
Also, I don't understand why would Russia support Trump. Any US politic hates Russia the same, be it democrat or republican. US is a fascist state waging fascist wars over resources (Vietnam, Iraq, Libya, Syria) that hates almost all the world because it considers itself a chosen nation and all the rest are savage nations. US inherently hates Russia. Always hated - read newspapers from 19th and early 20th century - the hatred was already there. Always will hate (just read comments under any news on Reddit /r/worldnews - many commenters say that Russia should be nuked, that Russians should be killed, etc).
Why would we care to elect Trump? Did he do anything good for Russia? No.
Actually, he appears to be a sane person unlike, e.g. Biden, so in our interest would be to elect a leader with dementia instead.
But I think one thing that is obvious is that Putin sees foreign relations as a very competitive ground, and so destabilizing the US is to the benefit of Russia, as they see the US as a major blocker for Russia's expension in the international sphere.
As for Americans, I don't think they hate Russians. What it is is they love their freedom, and they hate anyone who might be working to take it from them. That's why there are only two options, either make the whole world free, or continue to have the strongest military in order to protect their freedom from others. And I respect that, since I value freedom myself.
Russia, as you must know, isn't really promoting free and fair democracy right now. So American see them as a threat to free society and their freedom.
And Russia might be wanting to continue its expension of conquests to its former Soviet partners, so after expending in Ukraine and Georgia, they might want to move in on others. But the biggest blocker for Russia to expend its military conquests is NATO, and that's why destabilizing the US is to the benefit of Russia. Or having a president like Trump which didn't value NATO or helping its allies, that also benefits in this case.
Also, there is a lot of evidence that Russia meddled in US elections. Neither you nor me will see it first hand, so if you don't trust the FBI, the US House Committee of Intelligence, the Special Counsel of Mueller, and the Republican independent intelligence investigation, well there's nothing more you can do. But all those investigations reported the same finding, that there was systematic interference from Russia, attempts at hacking election systems, hacking of elected official computers, leaks of their data (like Hilary's emails), social media troll farms, etc. What there wasn't was enough evidence that Trump collaborated with them on this.
Another good reason isn't so much pro-trump as being against Clinton, since the Clinton are responsible for adding to NATO former Soviet allies like Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic. And that was always seen like a slap in the face by Russia, which made them wary of the US.
Some people even blame that move by Clinton for the bad US-Russia tensions we have today.
Hopefully that gave you enough context why Russia would want to interfere in the American elections, as well as simply in their general cultural and social spheres.
E.g., foreign media (mostly founded and sponsored by US) publish in Russia a flurry of messages that "Russia is suffering from unprecedented corruption" (which is not true). Then the same media conducts a poll how readers perceive level of corruption in Russia. Scared brainwashed readers report that their perceived level of corruption in Russia is very high. From these two lies CIA controlled media makes a "truthful" conclusion that corruption in Russia is high.
There're ton of other examples.
And Russia might be wanting to continue its expension of conquests to its former Soviet partners, so after expending in Ukraine and Georgia
No, it's a known fact that Georgia attacked Russia on 8.8.8. We could take the whole Georgia easily for retaliation, but didn't. We don't need it.
Just as we don't need Ukraine. We needed Crimea because it was our territory, our grandparents shed blood for it. And Ukraine wanted to give it to USA to build a naval military base. Would US react differently if Russia would start preparing to build a military base in Mexico, just on the border with US?
We don't need former Soviet republics. It was a mistake to accept them in the USSR, but early communists were idealists.
Take, for example, Georgia: it doesn't have natural resources, its population doesn't want to work. Or Baltic states, for that matter. They're just leeches that had the highest level of life in the USSR at the expense of Russian SFSR. Russians worked hard to build infrastructure and industry in those republics (that they've destroyed and sold for scrap for nothing in the first few years after USSR collapse - all of them - there's no any industry anymore), to feed them, to provide them with oil and gas from Russian oil deposits.
It was a huge waste of labor and resources, because they always hated us and after USSR collapse started to blame us for all their problems. I hope we won't repeat this mistake again. I'd prefer USA and EU to feed hungry Georgia, Ukraine and Baltic states rather than us.
Regarding hatred: there was never any plans in Russia to attack US. There was never any state (or other propaganda) that Americans or Europeans are bad people that need to be killed. This is a pretty clear contrast to what Europeans and Americans think about other nations. You consider yourselves a chosen nation and all others savages that must be controlled and even killed. E.g. open any western media, and you'll find lots of appeals to attack Russia and kill Russians. In social media this is even worse. You'd find tons of appeals to kill Russians on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit. And these aren't even moderated. You can right now open reddit/r/worldnews, and find such appeals under any news that mentions Russia.
You won't find anything like this in Russian media. We do not hate other nations. We do not consider ourselves to be "special" and having right to kill others.