Trump and Musk are constantly targeting London and Khan on social media, but sure, it's the Russians driving this.
Don't get me wrong, I've no love for Putin, but framing the Trump project as Russian misses the huge amount of American money and effort behind him.
Is Musk a Russian agent? The Heritage Foundation? Fox? There's a huge, all-American infrastructure behind Trump 2.0.
I'm sure plenty of countries did their very best to get that guy in the Whitehouse, but I don't buy that Putin is the main character here.
When he parrots the same ideas down to the exact same words in the exact same order, what doubt is there?
Have it crossed your mind that they're just closer to truth than what Western propaganda spreads about Ukraine conflict and why it started and keep going?
And you, has it crossed your mind that Putin and his supporters are lying?
It started because Putin wants the 'good old days' of the Soviet Union back, and he does not consider Ukrainians their own people, but just a bunch of folks that have forgotten they are really Russian/Soviet. The 'official' Rusian reason is/was because Ukraine was run by Nazis (never mind that Zelenskyy is Jewish).
Power and influence can be considered two different things.
As for holding sway over Trump: it's often generally anyone that can flatter his ego and/or put money in his pockets. (Or for his swaying himself: whatever will get the most headlines, the most people talking about him.)
Trump is not complicated:
Just a matter of time before you start hearing this again. They already tried this once using the Steele dossier.
Fact: Michael Flynn talked with the Russian ambassador.
Fact: Flynn lied about the content of his call. Not to journalists, but to FBI agents.
Fact: Trump dismissed Comey to stop the investigations around Flynn. He said it openly, on camera.
Fact: Trump pardoned Flynn.
Fact: Trump is pushing for the prosecution of Comey - a case so weak it has already been rejected before going to trial.
Fact: FBI agents have been demoted and punished for nothing else than working on the Russian dossier. Including respected career agents currently working on e.g. Iranian operations in the USA. Their only crime has been to be assigned to the Russian dossier, something they didn't choose.
You absolutely don't need the Steele dossier to see something's wrong - except to deflect from the obvious.
When I say it's apolitical I mean the con artists know exactly who to target, which is the right, because you can feed them anything and they'll keep coming back for more. It's far harder with the left, they'll say "this is all bullshit" and move on quickly, there's no money to be made there. There was a great interview a few years back with a California-based troll who said he targeted the right because that's where you got the responses: "We've tried to do similar things to liberals. It just never worked, it never takes off. You'll get debunked within the first two comments and then the whole thing just kind of fizzles out".
"Nothing personal, it's just business".
It doesn't matter if your enemy also wants to promote this. If you follow this line of thought, you have to support the government of China censoring the Tiananmen Square massacre. Because their enemies in the West have for decades been talking about it.
I agree that social problems should be exposed. One such social problem is widespread, entirely fabricated stories of crime and violence, accepted uncritically by people who don’t live in the supposedly affected areas, driving division and political discourse that lead to real-world harm.
There is an enormous amount of evidence that this propaganda, mainly spread through social media, is a product of a foreign government strategy to interfere in the internal politics of “enemy” nations. If this is true, it should be exposed and shut down.
That's not to say you'll do any good by hiding problems. It's just that exposing them isn't going to fix anything, either. You do have to fix your own problems, but you also need to get some breathing room by getting people to cease lying about it.