Washington Post Blames Putin's Russia For the Election of Donald Trump

The Washington Post was singularly anti Trump throughout the campaign. Examining the factors behind Trump's victory has lead them to the conclusion that the Russians were to blame. There is no little irony in this conclusion, since Reagan's Republican party thrived on confrontation with the old Soviet Union. Some on the right view Trump has the successor to Reagan, an outsider who wants to tackle old problems with new solutions.

In fairness, the Russians did hack the DNC and supported Wikileaks. But the Washington post says the fake news that proliferated on social media, did so not because a few dozen teenage boys in Veles, Macedonia wanted to make money with pro Trump news sites.

Some analysts believe Mrs. Clinton's failure to articulate a reason to elect her, other than her being next in line to Barack Obama, doomed her campaign. Candidates who have argued they were "next," have seldom done well--John Kerry, John McCain, and Mitt Romney among them. And she did fall down in front of the cameras, collapsing symbolically on 9/11. It didn't help that former Pres. Bill Clinton had to walk his wife up ramps, arm in arm. Not the best of visuals for a candidate to be the most powerful person on Earth.

From the Washington Post: "The flood of "fake news" this election season got support from a sophisticated Russian propaganda campaign that created and spread misleading articles online with the goal of punishing Democrat Hillary Clinton, helping Republican Donald Trump and undermining faith in American democracy, say independent researchers who tracked the operation. https://www.washingtonpost.com/business/economy/russian-propaganda-effort-helped-spread-fake-news-during-election-experts-say/2016/11/24/793903b6-8a40-4ca9-b712-716af66098fe_story.html?hpid=hp_hp-top-table-main_propaganda-8pm%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

"Russia's increasingly sophisticated propaganda machinery - including thousands of botnets, teams of paid human "trolls," and networks of websites and social-media accounts - echoed and amplified right-wing sites across the Internet as they portrayed Clinton as a criminal hiding potentially fatal health problems and preparing to hand control of the nation to a shadowy cabal of global financiers.

"The effort also sought to heighten the appearance of international tensions and promote fear of looming hostilities with nuclear-armed Russia.

"Two teams of independent researchers found that the Russians exploited American-made technology platforms to attack U.S. democracy at a particularly vulnerable moment, as an insurgent candidate harnessed a wide range of grievances to claim the White House. The sophistication of the Russian tactics may complicate efforts by Facebook and Google to crack down on "fake news," as they have vowed to do after widespread complaints about the problem.

"Russian President Vladimir Putin, in an interview with RT in 2013, said that he wanted to "break the Anglo-Saxon monopoly on the global information streams."

This disinformation campaign, writes Craig Timberg of the Washington Post, brought down Hillary Clinton and gave the White House to Donald Trump, an open admirer of Vladimir Putin.