Russian politician Dmitry Novikov said that the political unrest and divides in the United States were good for us, referring to his nation and its citizens. It is always beneficial when an enemy becomes destabilized within.

Russia’s fake news machine in overdrive

The massacre on Saturday in Pennsylvania has been used by Kremlin propagandists as the most recent illustration of political dysfunction in the United States; these are themes that Russian media influencers have been pounding home for years, particularly since the full-scale invasion of Ukraine in February 2022. 

The Russian Foreign Ministry declared that American democracy was “on the verge of suicide” after Trump was shot. Within hours of the Trump assassination attempt, the Russian media’s disinformation outlets opened up full steam with three main narratives: either the US carried out the attack, the Biden Administration had authorized or encouraged the shooting, or in a variation that implicated two of Russia’s adversaries Ukrainians had planned to assassinate Trump with the assistance of American intelligence services. 

It was all nonsense, but these notions have taken root across the nation in a place where objective news about the West is scarce. Similar bogus narratives have proliferated on American social media sites, but government agents and prominent Russian media figures and influencers were the ones spreading the misinformation in Russia. 

Scapegoats for Russian propaganda

Russian propagandists have been warning for years that Democrats were planning to assassinate Trump, but they have never provided any proof. They had advocated for the Russian security services to begin protecting our Donald. One of the most powerful media characters supported by the Kremlin, Vladimir Solovyov, reminded viewers at the beginning of his Sunday Evening With Solovyov television program on Sunday night that he had prophesied Trump would be killed. 

The US Secret Service had to have been involved in the scheme, he said, unless its personnel were unprofessional and stupid. These feelings were mirrored earlier on Sunday by Dmitry Peskov, the spokesperson for President Vladimir Putin, in the Kremlin’s first formal comment about the incident. It was clear to all outside observers that candidate Trump’s life was in jeopardy following many attempts to remove him from the political sphere, according to Peskov. Then, the Kremlin took up a position that many Trump fans had taken, charging the Biden Administration with fostering an environment that had “provoked an attack on (Trump)”.

Russia’s latest disinformation target

Peskov said that by “using first legal tools, the courts, prosecutors, and attempts to politically discredit and compromise the candidate,” Biden and the Democratic Party had set off the murder attempt. Spokesman for the Russian Foreign Ministry Maria Zakharova continued the issue and developed it. Zakharova said on her Telegram channel, “Exactly two months ago, I noticed that in the United States, they are literally encouraging incitement of hatred towards political opponents.” 

The US should use the funds it promised Ukraine to support the “American police and other services that should ensure law and order within the United States,” she proposed. Since the invasion of Ukraine, Russian officials and the state media apparatus have not ceased to denounce the United States and the West. Following the Trump attack, some well-known pundits seemed to be gloating, claiming that it was proof that the “American type of democracy” was deeply corroded and predicting that that democracy’s end was imminent. In addition to her clearly significant role as Foreign Minister, Zakharova has over 1.5 million followers on Telegram and Vkontakte. “All American media and commentators, commenting on the assassination attempt on Trump, are saying in one voice that this is a threat to American democracy, ” the author added in a follow-up piece. Just to be clear, liberalism has brought American democracy to a fatal condition. This is American democracy.

The Kremlin’s web of lies: Blaming Biden and Ukraine

Not by coincidence, one of Putin’s preferred propagandists is Margarita Simonyan, one of Russia’s most powerful orators. She is the leader of the RT media empire, and it is reported that she has tens of millions of followers across multiple social media platforms. According to Simonyan, there were similarities between the attack on Trump and the killing of John F. Kennedy. 

She argued that groups inside Kennedy’s government were responsible for Kennedy’s death. “Good old Lee Harvey Oswald comes into play when other ways to get rid of an inconvenient president have been exhausted,” Simonyan posted on her Telegram channel. “Watching America is like watching a TV series where the writers have run out of imagination long ago and now repeat themselves from episode to episode,” she said, just for kicks. “You already got used to the characters, like you get used to your house slippers, so you continue to watch,” she said.