The New York Times has a longish interactive feature describing, sigh, Donald Trump's Twitter habits. This primarily means explaining how (longer sigh) the holder of a title formerly ostentatiously referred to as the "leader of the free world" has managed to largely ignore the collected available resources of the United States federal government in favor of the extremely dumber approach of retweeting conspiracy nuts, overt racists, and whoever else manages to luck their way into a moment of Dear Leader's attention.
Nowhere in the story does the author point out that the actual problem that leads Trump to retweet conspiracy-mongering is his extraordinary gullibility (aka stupidity), and a profound indifference to whether or not anything he says or passes on is true. Even aside from the man having astonishing amounts of toilet-time to thumb through a mountain of dreck that any non-deeply stupid "president" would generally abandon in favor of, say, actual advisers and experts, Trump's Twitter habits are fueled by his incapacities. He republishes "Q" conspiracy tropes and random internet anti-Semites because the man is f--ked up in the head, incapable of the sort of discernments and decision-making that you would REALLY VERY MUCH HOPE THE HOLDER OF THE MOST POWERFUL NUCLEAR ARSENAL IN THE WORLD WOULD HAVE.
Ahem.
But here's what might be the key takeaway from the piece. It comes in the form of a quote from Clint Watts, cybersecurity professional and ex-FBI agent, who hints that Dear Leader's toilet-time comes with rather staggering national policy implications.
“You are very clearly capable of using Twitter to entice and influence this president,” he said. “You can distort the guy’s views from your house.”
This is not speculative. The Times notes that Twitter accounts identified as originating from foreign intelligence services are "frequent" players in the efforts by every random idiot Online to get Trump to notice and retweet them. It is a dirt-cheap method of bending his mind in whatever manner an adversary wants to bend it, and while it is not nearly as reliable as simply paying Sean Hannity cash to repeat your preferred trigger phrase on his television show, you stand a good chance of at least luring in some of the conservative propagandists Trump himself follows.
That's the other bit of this that the Times continues to put mostly between the lines, rather than make explicit: that it is not only Trump, but a phalanx of Fox News and other conservative personalities who are constantly elevating known false conspiracy nonsense to their followers, which is how Trump sees much of it to begin with, and it is absolutely intentional. Unlike Trump himself, perhaps, the majority of these "news" connoisseurs have the faculties to distinguish between truth and falsehood, but all are instead engaging in acts of propaganda aimed at their own nation, for their own gain.
So it is not exactly accidental, us ending up at this place. The top ranks of conservatism are pushing propaganda and conspiracy theories for the precise reasons all would-be despotic regimes craft them. His allies, and his campaign, are among the worst purveyors of false information, pumping out online frauds with a vigorousness that foreign troll farms are hard-pressed to match. (The most damaging yet may yet come from Trump accomplices Rudy Giuliani and Attorney General William Barr as they craft toxic conspiracies exonerating Russia, inventing Biden "corruption,, or whatever else can be brought to bear in last-ditch efforts to keep the movement and the leader from being toppled by its own crookedness and incompetence. Giuliani is simply a mobster, a for-hire gun, but Barr now seems the type that would rather bring down a republic than see his own ideologies foiled.)
We hardly need foreign powers to propagandize our citizens or our "president." If anything, they are being drowned out by the at-home versions. The whole movement has descended into everyone conning everyone else, all the time, about everything, from "Benghazi" stories to overpriced pills. Like the mortgage crisis that precipitated the last financial crash, each player seems indifferent to what might happen if they turn out to be not nearly as brilliant and in control as they imagine themselves to be.