In an instance of uncanny timing, Chen published his piece only a couple weeks before Donald Trump announced his presidential campaign and began his semi-hostile takeover of the Republican Party. Trump and that Russian troll farm would be permanently linked. The original piece didn't intersect with partisan politics. At one point, the trolls were spreading panic about an entirely fictitious chemical spill in Louisiana. In the fall of 2014, they were hyping the eventually-contained U.S. Ebola outbreak. The accounts seemed simply intent on sowing panic or distrust in official institutions, perhaps a proof of concept for something more ambitious in the future. Only a few months later, Chen noticed that the list of troll farm accounts he'd followed for the original piece had suddenly rebranded as Trump superfans.

The rest, as they say, is history. Things turned out much better for Donald Trump than Yevgeny Prigozhin. But I was reminded of this in the aftermath of Hurricane Helene and in advance of Hurricane Milton. There is abundant evidence that Trump, his campaign and his followers are going to town inventing and amplifying a range of conspiracy theories about the hurricane aftermath. But it seems almost certain that they're sharing the arena with latter-day versions of the IRA, whether they're housed in Russia or China or Iran or various other countries. This was the original aim of these efforts, quite possibly the deeper aim than assisting Donald Trump, which was more a means to an end: creating confusion and panic, sowing division within the United States and weakening trust in civic institutions. But weak social trust and division isn't something foreigners can do themselves on Twitter any more than they can create a social and political flesh eating bacteria like Donald Trump. These are social weaknesses at the heart of American society. They may be more or less unique to the contemporary U.S., or something more general in global early 21st century life. But they are strategic weaknesses for the U.S. on a global stage and are recognized as such by unfriendly foreign powers.