As with mobsters, the vigorish is a cost of doing business, so does Individual-1 want the country to bear the cost of undermining democracy and the rule of law.
Threatening the nation is only part of his malevolence. And RW media is a simple tool no different than how Putin operates.
Democracy is as pesky as election campaign laws when you’re trying to pay hush money to your mistresses.
“The mission seems to be to confuse, to muddy the waters,” said Peter Pomerantsev, a former Russian-television producer and author of “Nothing Is True and Everything Is Possible,” a memoir that describes the Kremlin’s efforts to manipulate the news.
The ultimate aim, he said, is to foster an environment in which “people begin giving up on the facts.”
[...]
Results such as these have encouraged what private groups say is a massive and ever-increasing investment by Moscow, which has placed numerous news outlets fully or partly on its payroll and operates at least one troll factory in which scores of employees disseminate pro-Kremlin messages using thousands of fake social media accounts.
[...]
British officials and experts who studied the events say the false narratives emerged from a Russian information ecosystem in which news outlets and social media networks are increasingly intertwined with the country’s intelligence apparatus and official communications organs. While independent media voices flourished briefly after the collapse of the Soviet Union, the Putin years have been marked by assassinations of prominent journalists and the silencing or muting of dissent. In recent years, the control over many of the largest news outlets has become nearly absolute, officials and analysts say.
Putin brought Russia’s privately owned, freewheeling TV networks to heel in one of his first major moves as president. The Kremlin now controls all of Russia’s main national television channels — and half of all Russians say television is their most trusted source of news. The channels deliver a strident, conspiratorial, pro-Kremlin message in hours of lavishly produced talk shows and newsmagazine programs every night.
Individual-1’s whole purpose has been personal gratification while undermining democracy’s key pillars and the corresponding rule of law.
Correspondingly, the GOP has become an authoritarian party.
First, the @gregpmiller article:
(1/5)
LBJ gave President-elect Nixon access to his highly restricted President’s Daily Brief.
CIA officers set up shop near his transition HQ in New York to brief him on the PDB. Nixon didn’t accept their offer to meet, so they took an envelope w/ the PDB to his office each day.
(2/5)
“Richard Nixon was not especially trusting in what the Agency would give him,” his foreign policy adviser Dick Allen told me. “He didn’t place a whole lot of inspiration and faith into Agency interpretations.”
The CIA outpost failed to get even a single meeting with Nixon.
(3/5)
As the transition ended, their suspicions about Nixon’s lack of interest in the PDB and their analysis were confirmed, in the form of a delivery to them from his office: a towering stack of the previous two months’ PDB envelopes—all of them still unopened.
(4/5)
A dejected senior CIA officer captured his colleagues’ feelings, calling the innovative outreach to the president-elect “an impressive performance, but to what end?”
Sure enough, Nixon as president avoided PDB briefings and may not have even read the written product.
(5/5)