How Trump Won the Russia Messaging War—and How the Democrats Lost It

When Robert Mueller found no smoking gun on collusion, Democrats largely turned to other matters. But Trump and his backers never stopped pushing their lies.

“Hoax.” “Witch hunt.” “Russia, Russia, Russia.”For a decade, Donald Trump has incessantly claimed that there was no Moscow assault on the 2016 election and that the subsequent investigations of Vladimir Putin’s covert interference in that contest, and the contacts between Trump’s campaign and Russia, were all a phony Deep State plot orchestrated to destroy him. He even railed against the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” in his recent speech to the United Nations General Assembly, a week after the news broke that a Putin crony had attended and covered hundreds of thousands of dollars in bills for Donald Trump Jr.’s lavish wedding celebration in the Bahamas.

Trump has been lying about all this. Multiple inquiries have produced much evidence showing that Putin messed with the 2016 election to boost Trump’s chances. Even a bipartisan Senate intelligence committee investigation overseen by then-Sen. Marco Rubio concluded in a 2020 report that Putin “ordered” the Russian operation in part to “help the Trump campaign” and that Trump aided Putin’s operation by “minimizing Russian involvement.” 

Yet Trump has essentially won the messaging war over the Russia scandal. Putin’s intervention—which included a hack-and-leak operation that targeted and impeded Hillary Clinton’s campaign and an extensive covert social media campaign that pumped divisive posts, including pro-Trump material, into the feeds of American voters—was one of several factors that contributed to Trump’s narrow victory that year. And Trump, in what was arguably an act of betrayal of country, aided and abetted a foreign adversary’s attack on American democracy by echoing and affirming Putin’s denials that he had meddled in the election. But all of this is barely mentioned these days. Not by Democrats. Not by many in the media. 

Trump’s claims of Deep State persecution, though, still rings out—and not merely as a personal pet peeve. At his urging, the Justice Department is pursuing a baseless criminal investigation of former officials in the Obama and Biden administrations who participated in Trump-Russia investigations, looking to prove the existence of a grand conspiracy against Trump. And his puzzling relationship with Putin remains significant, as Trump charts an erratic course regarding the war in Ukraine and pursues his own war against Iran, which is drawing crucial support from Russia, which is passing satellite targeting and other intelligence to Tehran and sharing missile technology. Discussing the conflict in Ukraine, Trump has at times characterized Putin and himself as co-victims of “Russia, Russia, Russia”—as if it were a bonding experience that affects his approach to the war in Ukraine. Over the objections of the United States’ closest allies, Trump has invited Putin to attend the upcoming G20 meeting that will be held in a Trump resort in Florida. 

How Trump Won the Russia Battle… 

Despite their relevance to today, the 2016 Russian attack and Trump’s complicity have been memory-holed. Neither were prominent issues in the 2020 and 2024 elections—even though during those campaigns, Russian intelligence again mounted operations to tarnish the Democrats. In 2020, a Ukrainian legislator named Andriy Derkach, who was a Russian agent, teamed up with Rudy Giuliani, then Trump’s personal attorney, to spread false claims of Joe Biden corruption (this is according to Trump’s own Treasury Department, which sanctioned Derkach). In 2024, Russian disinformation operatives pushed a host of fake allegations about Kamala Harris and Tim Walz, including the false charge that Walz had inappropriately touched a student when he taught high school—an allegation seen by millions of social media users. Trump dismissed reports of these Kremlin interventions with his all-too familiar “Russia, Russia, Russia” mantra.

Some might consider Trump’s........

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