An adversarial person can flood people with rethoric of issues, corruption, crime, against all established political powers and institutions, and position themselves as the solution to all those ilks.
They can do that by flooding the public square of free opinions (the internet), with disinformation, fake data, lies of omissions, lack of contextualization, attacking all others personally, ridiculing them, etc.
All they have to do is put doubt in people's mind, keep the focus on others, and appeal to emotions of more and more people slowly.
They can do that because they are free to do it.
Then they can gain the political power from it, and slowly replace institutional power with loyalists working for them.
Once they've managed to get enough loyalist in place through this method, they can remove the right to free speech and take over as a fascist or dictator, or other more authoritarian measures.
Then they can continue the same speech they've always been pushing as propaganda, even denying the removal, bans, jailing, and all that of their opposition, and voila.
This is a pretty straightforward playbook. It's played out many times before.
You can call it a soft-coup:
> populists who seek the centralization of power but do so under the pretense of improving democracy
At least to me, it's very obvious our system is susceptible to this kind of adversarial attack. I don't know the solution, you don't want to prevent this attack but enable another one in doing so, but it's a huge threat vector and I'd hope we recognize it and do something to mitigate it.