Trump's 'Putinite Republicans' raked over the coals by conservative leader

Former President Donald Trump and his cadre of "Putinite Republicans" are undermining and weakening America, warned Dan Hannan, a Conservative Party member of the U.K. House of Lords, in an op-ed for the Washington Examiner.

Last week's historic ouster of House Speaker Kevin McCarthy (R-CA), wrote Hannan, is an example of how Russian disinformation has sown mistrust in the U.S. political and media system, even among members of the same party.

"It is important to understand how hybrid warfare works. When Russian propagandists make obviously ludicrous claims — that Ukraine’s Jewish president is a Nazi, for example, or that Ukrainians are harvesting children’s organs — their purpose is not to convince but to sow doubt," wrote Hannan. "You are not supposed to come away thinking, 'Wow, those Ukrainians are fascists.' You are supposed to come away thinking, 'It’s all nonsense: CNN, RT, Fox, Jazeera, they’re all as bad as each other.'"

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"The profusion of news sources and the explosion of social media was a gift to foreign propagandists, and as the Senate Intelligence Committee laid out in detail, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s agents seized it," wrote Hannan. "Conservatives who criticized Trump were piranha-shoaled. In 2016, the piranhas were anonymous accounts with bad English. By 2020, thanks largely to artificial intelligence, they had become plausible, and politicians quailed before them. Why were the Russians so keen on promoting Trump? Did they have kompromat on him? Some commentators believe this would explain his warm words about Putin, but it seems likelier that the Russians saw him as a means to disrupt and delegitimize the U.S. political system."

These years of disruption, he continued, have turned the GOP from a party that was hawkish against Russia, into a party that comfortably welcomes people like former Trump strategist Steve Bannon, who believes the U.S. should ally with Putin because he wants to subjugate LGBTQ people. And Ukraine's "cameo role" in the first impeachment of Trump has left some MAGA supporters blindly wanting revenge on the nation.

"If you had told me 10 years ago that a Russian tyrant would be basing his hope for victory in an aggressive war on the election of a Republican administration, I’d have laughed," Hannan concluded. "How far my favorite party has fallen."