I just sat down and watched the old movie, "All the Presidents' Men". It is an old movie, but got interested in watching again after watching "The Post". In the movie about Watergate we learned that the Nixon dirty tricks campaign went way farther that just the Watergate break-in. I began to think and now I wonder if the Russian's updated the dirty tricks played by the Nixon covert group and played it once again on the USA. The real problem is that once again, it effected the outcome of the election. How much, we can not determine, but there is no question that the Russian's did effect the election as did the dirty tricks played by Nixon. I guess the old saying is true, if we don't know history we are bound to repeat it.
Putin's motivation for revenge stretches all the way back to Reagan's efforts in collapsing the USSR and East Germany. Putin was a KGB station chief in East Germany when it fell.
So there's no way he stopped at Tricky Dick's Dirty Tricks, that was the sophomore level course. He went for a deep dive in everything the CIA and Rand Corp had to offer.
At the time of Nixon's Dirty Tricks, the average Russian assumed that Americans were all either Elvis, cowboys or gangsters.
Not much changed by the time Reagan helped end the Cold War.
Putin's study continued on throughout 9/11 and beyond.
I would consider the arrival of affordable semiconductors in Russia and with it, cheap personal computing and broadband internet, a cornerstone.
Once social media began to arrive, it was like a doctorate level course in how to take apart America.
I'm sure he studied pundits like Alex Jones et al.
The Russians started playing around with the psyops and "Little Green Men" in Ukraine, that was a dry run to test the effectiveness of their psyops.
Don't forget, while he was diddling our social media, he was also meddling with politics in Italy, UK and France.
