This is exactly what is happening. I feel like people have to be deliberating ignoring all the evidence that Elon and Trump are foreign assets at this point. It has been obvious for years and only more obvious with time.
Certainly the Russians have been doing their best to dis-inform the voters, but that doesn't need to come from the top. And they are largely doing it by parroting the standard Republican talking points for the last four decades. The Russians are, at most, exacerbating what they already wanted to believe.
If anything, that's worse. They're not assets. They're doing this because they're genuine believers.
This might in fact be the only innovation that Russia can claim since the fall of the USSR: complete mastery of the technology of propaganda for controlling populations.
Conservatives have been threatening to drown the federal government in the bathtub since the 1980s. There’s no new beliefs. It’s just a reshuffling between the parties of the same folks that existed in 1990: paleocons and social conservatives, capitalists, neocons, nationalists, economic populists, etc. The anti-vaxxers were there, they were just democrats because that was the low-institutional-trust party back then.
The people you’re calling “Russian agents” were also there in the 1990s, as were the neocons calling them that. They just took over the GOP because it turned out that the Democrats (back then) were correct and american military intervention in places Iowans can’t find in a map is actually bad for the GOP base.
I’m old enough to remember conservative republicans from 2008 ish era and while there was some dumb stuff, anything 2016 and beyond is unparalleled and its revisionist to say otherwise.
The American public got slowly acclimated to turning into a ridiculous version of idiocracy. A mix of corrupt / easily bought politicians, a voter base addicted to consumerism and social media, and a country with a problematic voting system, all contributed to todays situation.
I used to wonder, like many kids, “why didn’t anyone stop hitler, he was so obviously bad”. It was never that obvious to me that so many other indoctrinated people could have been just as awful and far gone.
I pray those smart enough to see where all of this is inevitably leading to, leave the US before it’s too late for them to. Do not become an unwilling contributor to what the US does next.
"Idiocracy" came out in 2006, and Carl Sagan was writing about American anti-intellectualism long before that. I'd also note that 2008 brought us Sarah Palin on the Republican ticket. I agree things were better, but the rot was clear to some already.
Trump was elected to raise inflation, make markets unstable, waste money on conspiracy theory research?
How does money influence votes? Money pays for private intelligence companies, PR firms, think tanks, and social media influence.
What does this mean? It means that politicians are influencing the voter base, rather than the voter base influence politicians.
What is the corollary of all this? A foreign government can influence American voters either via more direct means (such as running a private intelligence company) or indirect means (offering resources in exchange for favors).
Is there precedent? Yes. America institutes regime change in other countries in many ways. France funded and offered aid to the pre-american rebellion against British rule resulting in the formation of a new state.
At some point people stop being individual actors and become statistics. It might be even more correct to say people are in A/B testing groups and there are engineers literally experimenting on these groups to achieve an outcome for the purposes of whoever paid them.
I don't recall most of the things going on now coming up during the campaign, so I don't see how you can conclude he was elected to do them. He was elected to do the things that he spent 95% of his campaign time on.
“If they were working with foreign powers to weaken the US, what would they be doing differently”
It should raise even more alarms how thus far every single critic of them even inside their own party was silenced or actually joined them!
I don't believe in threats as explanation on that scale. Many of those people are themselves well connected and influential.
I fear there is something deeper going on, and we will only find out by watching.
I hate this narrative that concentrates on Trump, or even Musk. Neither would be where they are now with a huge amount of active support. Whatever is happening is coming from inside the US. They may also be working together with foreign actors, but they act according to their own interests.