Panic World - Did Russiagate matter?

Episode Date: December 3, 2025

Even now our beloved host Ryan doesn’t know what he thinks about Russian interference in the 2016 election. So, he is joined by Garrett Graff, a journalist and author who continually re-examines the question: What is the truth behind the “Russia, Russia, Russia” scandal? How real and deep was their involvement in US politics in the past decade, and how important ultimately was it — or the idea of it? Our guest is Garrett Graff, host of the Long Shadow podcast, previously a national security journalist while all of these Russian interference allegations began, and the ⁠author of several books⁠. Check out Long Shadow ⁠here⁠ or wherever you get your podcasts, and follow Garrett’s other work at ⁠Doomsday Scenario⁠. This episode is sponsored by Uncommon Goods. To get 15% off your next gift, go to ⁠https://www.uncommongoods.com/panicworld⁠ ! Want even more Panic World content? Like ad-free episodes, bonus episodes, and access to the Garbage Day Discord? Sign up for a membership at:⁠ https://www.patreon.com/PanicWorld⁠. And if you want to see this conversation on video, ⁠⁠Panic World is now posting episodes to YouTube! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Once again, great to meet you. Thank you for coming on the show. I want to start with a really simple question. I think, you know, is good for today's episode to kick things off, which is, what's your favorite Russian meal? Oh, that is a great question. I am a fan of sort of the Georgian-style Russian meals. Like, I think that, like, the Georgian... About ketchup-puri? Yeah.

And I understand that there are some tensions between Mother Russia and... the Republic of Georgia these days, but if I'm eating Russian, would love me a Georgian restaurant. I think that's actually a great way to start, which is the best thing about Russia are the countries that broke away from Russia and are continuing to try to keep their independence from Russia. I agree. I was in Tbilisi earlier this year. It's a wonderful place. I am Ryan Broderick. With me, as always, is Grant Irving, who just had to go change his outfit really fast because we once again realized that we were about to be recording while wearing the same shirt. It's a thing that keeps happening. I don't know why.

And this is Panic World, a show all about how the internet warps our minds, our culture, and eventually reality. And joining me today, the host of the Long Shadow podcast, Garrett Graff, welcome to the show. Thanks for coming on. Thanks so much for having me. I am a huge fan of your work. Well, thank you. You have come on to talk about one of those, I mean, I feel like there's a few of these big topics that I come across. But this one to me is the one where I have the most conflicting feelings about it.

Like, I, to this day, don't totally know what I think about what we talk about when we talk about Russian interference, which is what today's episode is about. We're going to be going back through how Russia may or may not. Probably. See, I can't even get through the intro to this because I'm still so torn about it. How Russia was involved in the 2016 election and beyond. And you have done work on this, and you wanted to reexamine this as well. It feels like this is also kind of a scab you keep scratching.

Is that correct to say? I think so. And the scab only gets thicker, whatever terrible medical analogy we want to use here. Sure. Why? What is the top line for you about why you keep coming back? Because I feel similarly. For me, it's a couple of different things.

So my background is as a national security journalist for most of the period that all of these Russian interference allegations were unfolding. I was covering national security for Wired Magazine as a contributing editor and have spent a lot of my own career as a writer and journalist covering federal law enforcement. And so had actually written a book about Robert Mueller when he was FBI director. I'm the only journalist in basically the entire world who has ever spent meaningful time with Robert Mueller and was sort of already interested in the story of Russian interference and potential Russian interference over the course of 2016 before it became really the dominant story of American politics in 2017 and beyond.

So I guess the major question going into this right now is how important was Russia Russian interference in the 2016 election from where you're sitting now in 2025. Yeah. It's a question that I don't think we are ever going to fully know the answer to. Okay. And the way that I've sort of come around to thinking about it is sort of the same as the answer to the question, like, how much did Jim Comey's letter matter? You know, how much did Jim Comey's press conference matter? And the answer is it all mattered and it all shaped the media environment that unfolded across

2016 and particularly from that June to November window where you sort of saw Hillary Clinton's emails become the major subject of conversation. And what I mean by that to elaborate on it for a second is that, Republicans and sort of Maga World, I think, get hung up on a very true technicality that they say sort of Russian efforts did not change any American votes, which they mean in a truly technical sense that there is no evidence that Russian hackers accessed American voting totals on voting machines or Secretary of State websites and were able to manipulate actual votes in the election. But what it certainly influenced was the minds of American voters and the media environment in which the,

American election took place. And that goes all the way back in ways that a lot of people, I think, have forgotten or never fully understood. So there's sort of Russia all the way down in the course of this. And I think if you'll indulge me for a minute here to try to draw a sort of historical parallel about why this all ends up mattering so much is. Sure. Yeah, yeah. I wrote a book in 2022 about Watergate that sort of looked at sort of everything we've come to understand about Watergate. And the way that I sort of came to think about Watergate is Watergate was better understood as a mindset, not as an event. That we sort of think of Watergate as the burglary on June 17th, 1972.

but really it is a series of about 13 to 15 overlapping but distinct scandals that unfold across the Nixon campaign and administration from 1968 to 1974 that all really sort of emerge from the same conspiratorial mindset and paranoia that Richard Nixon brings to the White House. I think almost all of what we have lived through with Donald Trump is best understood as the same scandal. That it begins with this Russian interference in 2016. That becomes the sort of, you know, trigger point for the firing of Michael Flynn, which leads to the firing of Jim Comey, which leads to the appointment. of Robert Mueller, which leads to all of the efforts to obstruct justice and sort of impede the Mueller investigation.

Right. That leads to the first impeachment, which also sets the foundation for what becomes the big lie over the course of 2020 about election interference and the election being stolen, which leads to, of course, January 6th and the second impeachment. and in some ways, I think, sort of almost everything that we have seen, you know, with the Justice Department prosecutions of Trump since his campaigns of retribution afterward, like it all emerges from this stew of Russian interference and Russian campaign contacts that unfold across the summer of 2016. And I think we sort of misremember just how much. much of a straight line there is from like the mess and stew of that in the summer of 2016 to like where we are today with Donald Trump.

That's really fascinating. I had never really considered it that way. I've always been so hung up on whether or not we can believe what they think they can do. And perhaps it's because of the sort of angle that I approach just with my beat and what I've been writing about for the last 10, 15 years. This is like my major question has always been, can the IRA, which listener note, we will be calling the Internet Research Agency the IRA throughout this episode. We are not referring to the Irish Republican Army. We'll be doing a different episode about that for St. Patrick's Day next year.

No, I'm kidding. Maybe, though. That could be interesting. We could do a Sinn Féin Neck episode. Anyways, okay, I'm going off on a tangent. We both read that one book. I watched the Hulu adaptation. That's right.

Oh, so good. It was good. All right. I've been so hung up on can the internet impact and change people's minds, affect how people see reality? It is sort of the central question, I would say, of the work that I've done for most of my adult life. It's like, how does that work? But the idea that you're sort of putting forward, I immediately sort of think is correct. And tell me if I understand you correctly.

the sort of air of illegitimacy that Donald Trump entered the White House surrounded by, thanks to Russia, is sort of the driving engine behind everything he's done. And that is mainly because of the connection to Russia. Yes. And look, this is a guy entirely and solely powered by grievance. So if it wasn't Russia, there would be some. something else. But I think it is impossible to separate Trumpism from this sort of whatever actually happened between the Trump campaign and Russia and Russian interference in the summer of 2016. That sounds right to me based on everything we know about Trump. And as you said, power by grievance. Yeah. But I want to kick things off properly by going

through sort of step by step what we learned when we learned about Russian interference. Because I think probably for a lot of people listening, they might not totally remember. So 2014 is sort of the first big piece that comes out about the Internet Research Agency. BuzzFeed covers it. A Russian troll farm on Twitter and Facebook is uncovered. It's reportedly run by Putin's ally in chief. Yvgeny Progoshin. He was actually an old restaurateur, used to run one of,

Putin's favorite restaurants who had sort of diversified into like the world's most interesting catering company. And he ran this company called Concord Catering that on the one hand did like kindergarten meals for Russian elementary schools, ran a mercenary army in Syria and Africa. As you do. As one does. And then had sort of. set up this thing called the internet research agency as a sort of propaganda network with

professional trolls working out of offices in St. Petersburg that was primarily focused on boosting Putin domestically inside of Russia. Right. Okay. And as the 2016 election nears, against this backdrop where you already had sort of Macedonian troll farms realizing that politically polarizing content scored really well and drove ad revenue. And you saw progoshans, trolls sort of already perfecting how to do online propaganda domestically inside Russia. This light bulb sort of goes off and they're like, hey, why don't we mess around in American politics?

Right. You know, some of this you also have to put yourself in the mind of Putin, which is he sort of doesn't actually really care who wins the 2016 election in America. As long as America looks foolish, as long as he sort of stokes political divisions inside the United States. And he really personally hates Hillary Clinton. And so many, many such cases. Yeah. Yes. And so a lot of this begins, I think, on the Russian side, almost less as a pro-Trump effort and more as an anti-Hillary effort. Yeah, it's funny. I used to say that the more correct term for internet radicalization was actually internet destabilization. Yes. And the idea that you're sort of talking about, which is that it's not so much that Putin's, wants Trump to win, it's that a Trump victory would, well, history has proven that this did work, it would destabilize America and destabilize the American hegemony. And I think particularly resistance libs in sort of the back half of the 2010s, they couldn't

really accept that. So you get a lot of people sort of assuming that this is some sort of large scale Trump is working with Putin, Trump is Putin's puppet. And like, you know, I want to just sort of put all that off the table for today because I think it sort of gets in the way of really understanding like how the IRA works and what they're trying to do. And as you said, like this starts to ramp up as we get closer to the election. And so I want to spin through a couple sort of the bigger moments here as we kind of get a sense of what they're trying to do. So in June 2016, the Washington Post reports that Russia hacked the DNC.

The hacker, Goosefer 2.0, claims they're acting alone. Gawker publishes those hack docs, which were sent by Goosephor. They write a 200-plus page document that appears to be a Democratic anti-Trump playbook compiled by the Democratic National Committee

has leaked online following this week's report. And then from Gawker, they outline a seven-pronged attack plan, which is in these DNC documents. So the first is the argument that Trump has no core. True. Second is that Trump is running a divisive and offensive campaign. True.

He's a bad businessman. Fourth, he espouses dangerous and irresponsible policies. They call him the misogynist in chief. They say he's out of touch. And he's a member of the elite. They say they want to focus on Trump's personal life and the fact that his ex-wife accused him of rape. And the Trump campaign at the time alleges the DNC hacked themselves.

What would you sort of say about this first like salvo in the information war? Because I, like I said, I agree with you that this is the first domino. But it is almost like

hard to read this now because of how naive everyone seemed to be about everything. Like I was kind of not looking forward to doing this episode because it's so painful. because I don't, I still don't think we, we totally grasp like what this did to American politics, this sort of first, um, and also like, another kind of just to throw another question

at you. Like the, the, the role of the press in this is also something I grapple with. It's the same kind of guilt I have about being involved in like the viral content industry at the time too where it's like, it was just total information free for all and Russia like, seemed to really understand that innately. Yes. You know, it's not that the Russian trolls were able to get their means viewed by a statistically significant portion of Florida voters who were influenced, you know, to vote for Trump

rather than Hillary. It's that they changed the whole landscape on which those last five or six months of the presidential campaign were were competed on um you know that they helped amplify the concerns online about Hillary Clinton's health in September after she appeared to stumble at a September 11th memorial event you know that they um you know got Jim Comey worked up over, you know, Hillary's emails that they sort of confused in the public's mind, the emails that they were leaking, that they had stolen from the DNC, stolen from Hillary Clinton's campaign, and the sort of whole question of Hillary's emails

at the State Department, which is an entirely sort of separate and unrelated scandal, but if you sort of go up to the sort of average information voter in America, like I can't tell you the number of people that I've talked to who have been like, and then Russia released Hillary's emails from the State Department. And you're like, actually, no, it was John Podesta's emails. And they were when he was campaign chairman. Oh, wait. Well, here.

Let me do it. I've got it right here. In July of 2016, WikiLeaks releases. the emails. The day before the actual DNC, the DNC chair has to resign. And this is with the Guardian wrench at the time. In another email to DNC officials, another official identified only as Marshall said of Bernie Sanders. Does he believe in a God?

He had skated on saying he has a Jewish heritage. I think I read he is an atheist. This could make several points difference in my peeps. Oh my God, these fucking people, man. And then like a couple days later, the leaks are immediately tied to Russia. And then you start to get the first emergence of what I would call like the Trump circus. It's essentially like a Coen Brothers film that's just like happening in the side of American like politics at all times now. And like a Coen Brothers film, I never really sort of know how much they are lying, how much they are believing things that aren't true, how much they are over.

inflating their own worth or influence or impact or involvement to seem more important to Trump. And so when Roger Stone in August of 2016 says that he's communicating directly with hackers and wiki leaks, I mean, probably not. Like, I mean, it just, it's, it's, it's, it's so infuriating that like once this stuff hits the web, it just immediately gets pulled in a million different directions by Democrats, Republicans, random internet users. It's just, it's a total like information, I don't know, smoke screen in a way. Absolutely. And when we talk about Russian interference, we're often only talking, most people sort of only talk about the social media trolls from the internet research agency. Right. This hack and leak operation is actually an entirely separate thing being run by the military,

in Russian military intelligence agency known as GRU. Like this is a operation sort of by their equivalent of the CIA. And does the IRA, do they report to the GRU? No, the IRA is, you know, if Yvgeny Progoshin owned and operated mercenary troll farm. So, you know, it only reports to Yvgeny Pregozheny Progoshan. You know, I don't know that we even know today whether there was, you know, one single meeting where Vladimir Putin and the Russian military and Yvgeny Progoshin

all sat around a table, you know, with some Excel spreadsheets and we're like, okay, I'm going to post the, you know, following troll things on Tuesdays and et cetera. They had a slackroom and a Hootsweet account and a dream, you know, And remember there's a bunch of other like super weird stuff happening along here of, you know, like meetings at Trump Tower with Russians who are sort of like trying to offer help and Don Jr. writing that email basically saying like, hey, if you're actually serious about helping us and you have something good for us, like, you know, we're happy to talk about it. Yeah. And you've got Paul Manafort, the Trump campaign official, you know, slipping polling data to, you know, oligarchs overseas that like we still don't really know what all of that ended up happening and sort of where all of that polling data went.

And again, to your point, is that criminal conspiracy or is that Paul Manafort who like knows that he's doing all of this super criminal stuff like trying to butter up the old. oligarchs with like look at the great data I can get you and like you should really keep paying the absurd amounts of money to buy you know goose coats this is my exact take on Cambridge Analytica by the way also with with Brexit which is like how much bullshit is being thrown around about what they can do and I do before we go to the break I do want to run through a few things that I think are useful for for people who are just who are still trying to make sense of this to think about so if you look at what Russian trolls in particular were up to.

The primary thing that they were doing, based on the research that I've seen, is they were, as you said, running viral accounts, promoting scams, trying to get traffic. Also, I think they, as it became more mature, they realized that you needed kind of an established feeling account to properly sort of look legit. A great example of this was a Russian troll that was running a Tumblr account called Lagongirl, who spent years pretending to be a black teenager and would basically just cause fights on Tumblr and post memes. And that was primarily what they were doing on Twitter and Facebook as well. They were largely either like just promoting Trump content or more insidiously pretending to be liberals, leftist, progressives and just picking fights with other people. And one fascinating op that I came across in the, I think it was the summer of 2016,

the Russian users were organizing Facebook events for black voters in Philadelphia, using Facebook events, with the idea that they were trying to get everyone to show up and then nothing would happen to make it look embarrassing or make people feel confused. So it was a lot of that kind of social engineering. And I always bring it up when I have this conversation because I think in a lot of people's minds, especially with resistance, people. If you see pro-Trump content, you're like, oh, that was from Russia. And it's like, no,

actually a lot of it was the opposite. Yeah. And that's one of the goals of Russian disinformation. Exactly. The goal of Vladimir Putin, you know, from the day that he took office to now, is to undermine Western democracy, Western society, the rules-based. international order, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And to sort of make us think that our system is as bad as his system. Right. Sort of the goal with all of this was just to sort of seep into and continue to pull apart and enrage Americans around already existing scenes in our democracy and

our society. So, you know, their goal is to just sort of encourage us to burn ourselves down, which, you know, we've done a pretty good job of doing ever since 2016. The argument that I tend to subscribe to is that Putin watched the Arab Spring turn into the Libyan Revolution that killed Murma Gaddafi and basically has spent the last 24 years building a digital infrastructure to make sure that it doesn't happen to him and does happen to his enemies. I think if you look at the 2016 election to now as an American Arab Spring and especially the second wave where things become extremely chaotic and violent across that region, I tend to think that's the easiest way to, to understand Putin's motives. Once again,

it is not to install Trump. It is to have riots and violence in the streets and, well, basically modern day America as we see it now. And after the break, we're going to talk all about how the beginnings of that started right after the DNC leak with a little movement called Pizza Gates. Pizagate is the precursor to QAnon. Pizsigate starts right after another round of leaked emails are published by WikiLeaks on my birthday, October 27th. And this is, I feel like the moment, the current American political status quo, particularly on the right, just begins. Like, weirdly enough, I believe on my birthday in 2016, the modern American world was created where we now have conspiracy theories. on the right that are evolving faster than we know what to do with them.

We have information warfare coming from all different directions, infighting on the left, and a like quickly evolving right wing that's learning how to under like learning how to maneuver through this. What is your sense on this scandal's impact on the election? And what I'll say here is I was living in London during Brexit. I have believed for 10 years that the best. something like this can do is push something by like 0.51%. Like I feel like looking back,

all of this energy online can move the needle and really only works in a super tightly contested election. Does that feel right to you? Absolutely. Because again, this is all about exposing and exacerbating existing scenes. Right. I call them cultural pressure points. Yeah.

So let me back up because I completely buy your birthday inaugurating the doom state. It was also the end of Vine. See, that was probably it. That was probably. You were probably right. This was Ryan getting both of his birthday wishes. He said, no more Vine. I don't like it.

I don't like people being creative. And two, I want the world to be horrible. So Garbage Day is popular. I said, I said, I want Vine to be shut down until someone like Elon Musk can buy Twitter. And I said, I want, I want Donald Trump to be president. That's what I said on my birthday. Yeah. So yeah.

So you sort of see this as the beginning, though. But let me also back up because I think there's another date in October earlier that month that sort of is important and instructive in this, which is Friday, October 7th. And you have three things happen over the course of Friday, October 7th. So the U.S. intelligence has been watching all sort of summer and fall as you have the Russian hack and leak operation. They are completely unaware of the Internet research agency's existence or its impact and campaign in over the course of the election year. but they are starting to notice Russian hackers beginning to probe election infrastructure. So this is like actual voting systems, voting, rallying, things like this. They are trying to harness over the course of the fall of 2016, a bipartisan statement from congressional leaders on the Hill.

and the White House that says Russia is trying to interfere in this election, we condemn Russian interference, America's elections are secure. Mitch McConnell, comma, great American, tells the White House and the intelligence community to pound sand and that he refuses to participate in any bipartisan statement condemning Russian interference in the election. So on October 7th, in the morning, U.S. intelligence leaders put out a statement almost immediately lost to history warning that Russia is trying to interfere in the election. Again, in a technical sense that Russia is attempting unsuccessfully to influence voting machinery. But they want Americans to be aware, they want it to sort of be a warning, they want

Russia to know that this is a red line. Yeah. That afternoon, the Access Hollywood tape comes out from the Washington Post. Right. Absolutely burying the news of purported Russian interference. So over the course of October 7th, you have sort of America's one attempt to stop and warn the American public of what is transpiring, that is just completely swept aside in politics, and that by the sort of the end of the month, as voting is starting to take place, America, like, still doesn't really understand Russia's role in any of this, or even that there is a very active campaign by the Russian government, Russian intelligence, in Russian military to try to influence the election.

All of this is happening. I would say one of the most unique moments in American media history because you still had mainstream establishment media on broadcast, radio, cable, you had them all still working. And in fact, a lot of them were figuring out very quickly that they could publish online and then have that stuff shared to Facebook. Then you also had venture capital backed digital media outlets. We talked about them in the first section, the BuzzFeeds, the Gockers, the Vices. And then you also had the right wing versions, the bright parts, the gateway pundits, all of these guys.

And they also figured out that if you wrote for Facebook and you followed the certain things that Facebook wanted you to follow, you had access to a readership that has never existed before and has never existed again. And because of that, everything was kind of the same. same size of importance. And it is a really hard thing to imagine now because I think we have very much entered a world created by this moment where nothing is of any importance. And it's very hard to keep things in your head because everything has been reduced to tic-tokable moments and screenshots on Instagram. And we're not in a world anymore where everyone is going to Facebook to look at a news article and read it and share it. That just doesn't exist anymore. And because, Because of that environment, I think you're exactly right that there was only really room for like one.

I mean, I was in newsrooms having these conversations that like if you got up that morning and there was already a viral story happening, you couldn't, you wouldn't do anything because Facebook wouldn't allow it. You know, and this peaks with the dress. But this is the exact moment where there is one national conversation a day and either you're part of it or you wait and you're trying to. better start it the next day. And so yeah, I think you're exactly right that we had this one moment to let people know what was going on and we, it just didn't work. And there's another aspect of what you're talking about there that matters and is important in this, which is the way that Facebook builds its algorithm, the way that Twitter builds its algorithm matters a great deal in this moment. 100%. You're talking about time on site metrics. This is like the rise of that. Yeah.

Exactly. And at one point, Facebook actually has sort of the equivalent of its dislike button, weighted five times more heavily in the algorithm than the equivalent of the like button. Right. What is important to really understand is that that viral conversation is being sort of hyper-selected to be at all times as polarizing and in. is raging as it can possibly be because that's more profitable for Facebook and for Twitter. So this is all happening and this is how the majority of Americans at the time are processing the entire media landscape. And I think that really does color how people understand what

happens next. So in December of 2016, the CIA concludes that Russia did make an effort to elect Trump. A few days later, Putin is officially linked to that effort. In January 2017, CNN reports that Trump knew about Russian efforts to help him win. Then BuzzFeed publishes the Steele dossier. Very controversial. I was in the newsroom when those conversations were happening. I still don't know what to make of it years later. But if you don't remember what it was,

it was effectively a dossier of what was going to be submitted, I think. It was like an oppo research effectively. Yeah, it was appo research that had been handed over to the FBI. FBI, yeah, exactly. And it is also the beginning of the Trump P-Tape, which I subscribe to. I've decided that's the one thing I really want to believe from that era is that the P-Tape exists and it's real. And if you have it, you can send it to me if you want. I mean, you've been using AI to generate that.

It's just not the same, though. I want the P-tap. And then things start happening very quickly. So Trump claims that he's being wiretop by Obama. Obama's not president anymore, but that doesn't really matter. the White House says that Trump isn't the target of any investigations. Comey confirms there's an investigation, but not specifically of Trump. Trump fires Comey, using Hillary's emails as an excuse.

And then by the time we hit the fall of 2017, basically is when a wave of reporting about the troll farm's relationship to the election starts to hit Vanity Fair writes about it. I think this is when it fully enters popular imagination, as the spooky kind of Russian troll farm. And as you said, throughout all of this, the main way Americans were learning about this was through articles online primarily shared through Facebook. If those metrics are to be believed. We're talking tens, hundreds of millions of people, views, eyeballs coming through Facebook, coming through a system meant to create division and anger.

And they're processing a influence operation that was meant to be. create deficient. It is such a dark irony of all of this is that Facebook's business model is effectively the same as as Putin's political goal there. And I guess what I would love to hear you sort of talk about a bit is, you know, as the popular culture is catching up with all this and understanding, you're beginning to understand what Russia did, do you feel like that hurt or helped Trump. Because I think there's an argument to you made that the, the conspiratorial nature of this Russian sort of influence actually gave him political wiggle room. Yeah. Early on, it enormously constrains him. He feels very sort of caught by this, very constrained. But I do think over time,

the sort of what he just keeps repeating over and over again as the Russia hoax. begins to become this sort of core foundational mythology of Trumpism and sort of the Maga movement, which is the sort of existence of the deep state that's always out to get him. Right. You know, they're ginning all of this up. You know, he's under attack from the FBI, even while he's president. He's under attack from his own Justice Department. And that I think as he continues to defy political gravity for, you know, the last 10 years in America,

I think sort of the Russia hoax becomes an incredibly important part of the story that Donald Trump tells to himself every day when he wakes up from bed and goes to bed, which is, you know, the government has been weaponized against me. I have to go out and weaponize the government against my enemies in the same way that they are, you know, using the government against me. that he sort of just begins to believe this in part because I don't know that there's like almost everything about all of this Russia interference in 2016 and the Russian campaign contacts for Trump himself I think is sort of guilt by association like I don't really think there is some you know signed document between Donald Trump and a GRU handler or Vladimir Putin saying, like, I, Donald Trump, am going to be your new Mancurian candidate to, you know, sink the United States from the inside. It was filmed on the P-Tape. That's why we need the P-Tape. I agree with you. I agree with you there.

I wrote a piece actually for Wired in 2019 that I think actually sort of stands up pretty well. where I said, it would be rather embarrassing for Donald Trump at this point if Robert Boller were to declare that the president isn't an agent of Russian intelligence. The pattern of his pro-Putin, pro-Russia, anti-FBI, anti-intelligence community actions are so one-sided, and the lies and obfuscation surrounding every single Russian meeting and conversation are so consistent. If this president isn't actually hiding a massive conspiracy, it means the alternative is worse. America elected a chief executive so oblivious to geopolitics, so self-centered and personally insecure, so naturally predisposed to undermine democratic institutions and coddle

authoritarians, and so terrible a manager and leader that he cluelessly surrounded himself with crooks, grifters, and agents of foreign powers, compromising the national security of the United States government and undermining 75 years of critical foreign alliances just to satiate his own ego. And I think that that's sort of the weird thing that we sort of still are in 10 years later. And no, it actually like, this is just Donald Trump being exactly the horrible human being and horrible world leader that he is. Yeah, I like from from 2015, 2014, 2015 until around 2019, I was overseas covering basically a bunch of other far-right populists taking power. And I have seen similar operations to the one that happened in the U.S.

I was in Italy when Georgia Maloney is starting to gain power and La Liga. And I was in Spain when the Catalan separatists decided that they were going to try to break away from Spain. And I was in the Netherlands for Gert Veilder's first election where he started to win big. I was in Berlin when the AFD won a third of the Bundestag. I've seen those NATO countries go through the exact same op that we went through. And I've seen it work and I've seen it work less well. Like I said, I was in the UK for Brexit, which I think similar. But it's kind of beginning to sound like you're the.

common problem. You are not the first person to say this. I had an editor. Dude, dude, I went to Hong. I was in Wuhan in 2019 and I took a train to Hong Kong in 2019 in December. Okay. I moved back here full time right before our 2024 election. Our listeners know that I'm bad luck. But what I will say, what I will say is I have been to countries where the Russian influence was best as I can tell not present. I saw no evidence of it in 2018 in Mexico. I saw not a ton of evidence of it in Brazil. I have seen countries go through it

and countries that haven't gone through it. And if it works, if it doesn't work, it is so context dependent. It is dependent on the media landscape in that country. It's dependent on the cultural pressure points of that country. It's dependent on if Russia is even interested in that country. The common denominator there is like Facebook penetration. It's the construction of the internet in that country.

But I do believe that if Russia hadn't taken an interest in our election in 2016, Trump probably would have still been president. So here's what I think would have been different. And let's remember this is an election that is decided by fewer than 80,000 votes spread across three states. Right. And what I do think would have been different in ways that I cannot articulate or predict is the arc of the Hillary Clinton email story. I think a lot of us sort of think of this as only like memes on Facebook. But it was really, I think, the way that the online conversation around the Russian hack and leak around the memes and the politically polarizing content that's.

circulating on Facebook influences the media environment that is covering the campaign day to day. 100%. And that in ways that I think we can't fully understand the entire arc of the Jim Comey Hillary email story would have been different across the summer and fall of 2016. And if that arc had been different, I think Hillary could have won. Part of what frustrates me so much about this whole conversation, I think it got mutated in a way that sort of took responsibility off of the Democratic establishment and the campaign that Hillary ran. And I just wonder how much you've struggled with sort of like watching this narrative unfold. that it's like we only lost because of, you know,

somebody was because he was cheating, not because there was anything within our own power to do. And thus we must do the same exact thing again and just complain about the cheating some more. Absolutely. And by the way, I think that's true of both of the Democratic losses to Donald Trump, where I think the mythology of the 2024 election

is always going to be, Joe Biden was too old and shouldn't have run and then we shouldn't have put up a woman with 107 days and, you know, gosh, these two elections are just total outliers and there's nothing that we could possibly ever learn or apply about sort of why we failed to understand the appeal and voter interest in Donald Trump. Yeah, I agree. I, um, my sort of glib opinion about this coming into this episode and, and both of you have sort of, have moved me on to a much more nuanced place. You're welcome.

But yeah, I'm thrilled to be here. I liked it before when I was just cynical. So what? That it was Russia because Facebook had just set the capability of this to happen. And if it wasn't Russia, it would have just been GOP opposition because they were just running a much better campaign on the internet anyways. And that like, that it was a foreign country sort of distract from the point that, like, the infrastructure was was made inside our house of Facebook being an American company that just, like, primed this for this situation. Yeah. Well, I think if I can offer a friendly amendment to your thought, where what I think you are right about is that this is actually mostly a media story and not a foreign interference story. That's how I've always. I've always seen it.

Yes. That, you know, sort of part of the backdrop and the way that this has been sort of twisted and mythologized on both sides is it's like, those dastardly Russian trolls got people to vote for Trump who wouldn't have. And like, I don't really believe that and I don't really think that's what happened. What I think did happen was Russian. sort of understood innately

something about the sort of poisoning polarization that social media at the peak of the age of virality was doing to politics and that they were able to weaponize our own tools against us to influence

and change the media conversation around the 2016 election in a way that has, you know, potentially destabilized American politics and, you know, begun to unwind American democracy. So your central theory, which again, I think is dead on, that the illegitimacy, created by Russian intervention is the driving engine of Trumpism for the last 10 years. I think also if you think about that, it has a fascinating reverse implication for me, as I've sort of been talking to you today thinking about this, which is, and this is why I wanted to come back to this story right now, actually, because I think Russian interference also allowed for the American Democratic establishment to believe that Trump was an aberration.

And I believe that if we had acknowledged that, and this is why that question of like, did it matter? Like, did? And I think you can say, yes, it does matter. And then we can talk about how it mattered. Sure. And we have today. But I think if the Democratic establishment had reckoned with the fact that Russia or no Russia,

Trump probably still would have been president, I think. They would have done more, I hope, in the alternate reality I'm imagining, they would have done more to prevent his second win. You basically go into the Biden years being like, well, yeah, Russian interference, Facebook, but like all those things are over now. It's COVID, like fresh start. And then we have the insurrection. And myself, I think a lot of internet culture writers, a lot of tech reporters looked at the insurrection. And I think it was fairly split of like, this is the rest of our lives. And then I think a lot of other people were like, this is the end of this.

If you look at it now, five years later, four years later, I don't think Trump was an aberration. I think in this way, like in a way, the long shadow, if you will, of Russian interference, it has driven Trump to further and further extremes. And it has also allowed the rest of us to kind of like write it off a bit. it's infuriating to look at the clown car crash that was 2015 to 2016 today and like see all these moments, these sliding door moments were like we could have been able to like pull this stuff apart. And then it becomes so enmeshed together because of the internet and the way the information landscape works that it's impossible to see where the dominoes are hitting each other, I think. You've hit on a thing that I spent a lot of the Biden years saying when I was talking about politics, which is,

is as a historian, we don't know where we are in the Donald Trump story. That we don't know whether we are. Chapter one, baby. Right. Like, we don't know. This is the prologue still. Barons of real chapter. Barons coming, baby.

We don't know whether this is the beginning, the middle, or the end. It is the opening crawl of Star Wars, a new hope. That's where we at right now. even started. I think you're right. I think you're absolutely horrifying. What you're saying is horrifying and correct. The last question I have for you is, could it happen again? Well, the story since 2016 has been that we don't need Vladimir Putin to do this to American media, to the American internet to American politics. Yeah.

Because we have now learned how to do this to ourselves. True. Donald Trump's mythology of 2020 in, you know, the stolen election of 2020 and, you know, the very confusing and cognitively dissident message that when he was in power, Democrats managed to rig the election. But when Democrats were in power, power in 2024, they somehow forgot to do so. That's right, yeah.

He has now taken all of these tactics that at the start were sort of tactics being done by foreigners to us. And now, you know, in sort of the classic horror movie sense, like the calls coming from inside the house. We have now sort of speed run in the course of the, 10 years of the Trump era, from this sort of age of virality of social media algorithms to this age of AI-driven TikTok videos where, like, none of us believe any of the things that we are looking at anymore. And that like Donald Trump has sort of sufficiently poisoned the well

of media and information ecosystems in America that like most of us spend most of our days doubting whether sort of anything is true. If you can convince a population to believe in nothing, you can kind of operate in any way you like. You don't really even need to hide because no one believes what you're doing. The best example of that being one of Putin's right-hand men is a playwright who used to give money to the opposition party. and then tell people about it so they would seem like they were implicated.

You know, like this is the levels of untruth that we're living in. And Russia obviously had a hand in building that world, no doubt about it. But as you said, we can do it to ourselves now. We understand the playbook. And the playbook is evolving with new platforms that also understand how to do time on site better than Facebook, know how to do personalized algorithms better than Instagram. and AI automates all of this. And that's as much as we can say about AI on this podcast without our readers emailing us angrily.

So that's the end of that thought. But I am struggling to find a not bummer way to end this. But here's what I think is good about where we are right now. Give it to me. I need some hope here. The internet remains an inherently insolently insubes. Surgent media. You know, I got my start in this world working on Howard Dean's presidential campaign in...

We've done three episodes talking about that campaign, actually. That's so funny. We've been going back through all the write-ups about Deanex for months now. It is sort of like the beginning of this entire story. That's so wild. That's so fucking wild. We thought we were doing a three-partner. We actually were doing a four-part.

Holy shit. No way. Right here. This has to come out after the third episode involving Howard Dean because that's what. I'm already cutting. It is so funny that like every time we're like, okay, like when did the beginning of internet politics in America start? And it's like it's Howard Dean. He's the guy who figured it out first.

That's so funny. So the thing that I take hope in is the professional Democratic Party has. has been so completely outclassed by Donald Trump, that it is clear to me that the only success Democrats have going forward is going to be to organize around and outside and in spite of the professional leaders of the party. And that what I hope is that these tools and these media are going to be able to be used by a new generation of non-gerentocracy leaders

to build a platform and party filled with sort of hope for the future in the way that I think you saw Howard Dean and Barack Obama as insurgent outsiders and Donald Trump as an insurgent outsider in 2016 sort of help drive and change politics over the last 25 years. I'll take it. That sounds good. I'll take it. Thank you for coming on this show.

If people want to follow you, where can they do that? So the podcast is Long Shadow, which is available wherever you get your podcasts and Longshadowpodcast.com. And then my writings are at Doomsdaystay, Doomsday scenario.co, which is where I write my own non-substack newsletter, doomsday scenario.com. And your troll farm that you run and operate, where's that based out of currently?

It is based out of a non-extradition country that I hope to not have to visit myself. Great, yeah. In person during the Trump years. That's great. Thank you again for coming on. This is a delight, seriously. Panic World is a production. of Courier. It is written and produced by Grant Irving and hosted by me, Ryan Broderick.

Josh Fielstead is our production coordinator and our amazing researcher is Adam Bumas. From Currier is Shane Verkest, who edits our video episodes along with our producer, Kevin Maroney, and National Managing Director and Executive Producer Kevin Dreyfus. R.C. DeMezo is their VP of Brand and Social. Charlotte Robinson is their Deputy Director of Brand and Social. Marianne Couga is their Director of Marketing, YouTube, and podcast growth marketer Samantha Hollos. And Tracy Kaplan is the senior vice president of sales and distribution.

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