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POLITICS
17.03.2021 | 14:37
A new US intelligence report that finds Russia interfered in the 2020 election to help Donald Trump and hurt Joe Biden also underscores a fundamental truth: The gravest threat to US democracy comes from within.
The report, released by Director of National Intelligence Avril Haines, finds that Moscow sought to inject misleading information about Biden into the campaign through officials and others close to Trump.
The real bombshell it contains is not the confidence of the spy agencies that Russia hoped to subvert American democracy. It is that US intelligence experts effectively confirmed that for the second election in a row, Trump acolytes repeatedly used, knowingly or otherwise, misinformation produced by the spies of one of America’s most sworn foreign adversaries to try to win a US election.
And given the advantage of hindsight, the latest intelligence assessment is not just an isolated example of incriminating evidence against Russia and its efforts to create chaos and discord within the United States.
For all of the stale US debate about whether Trump and his aides “colluded” with Russia, there are now multiple reports, intelligence assessments, and other known details to expose a damning reality: Moscow with its election meddling, Trump acolytes pushing false claims of voter fraud and his GOP supporters in the states now passing voter suppression laws share the same goal — the denigration of the US democratic system.
The readiness of the former President’s men to use Russian misinformation in 2020 — while denying collusion in 2016 — was but one prong of the assault on the integrity of US elections. After all, it came as Trump was challenging democratic customs that form the bedrock of American freedoms.
He spent months seeking to discredit the fairness of the vote — the sacred core of US democracy — to hedge against his eventual loss. He later denied his fair-and-square defeat, incited the deadly US Capitol insurrection — which sought to disrupt Biden’s transition to power — and is using his sway over his party to force future Republican candidates to sign up to his big lie of widespread voter fraud.
Thus, the candidate who Moscow helped to win the 2016 election had four years later become the primary destructive force aimed at US democracy.
It ought to be concerning that the sentiments of many Republicans who falsely decry the fairness of the current US electoral system appear to coincide with those of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Ultimately, the most alarming implication of the release of Tuesday’s report is that it may not be necessary for Russia to interfere in the 2024 presidential election in the same way as in 2016 and 2020.
From Trump’s lies about a stolen second term to claims by some Republican governors that making it harder to vote makes an election more democratic, some Americans are already doing far more themselves to damage the US system than Moscow can.
