Trump lies that the guilty verdict against him — by a jury of his peers that his own attorneys picked — is an illegitimate, politically motivated show trial. Trying to help Trump destroy Americans’ faith in our democracy and its justice system, Russian president Vladimir Putin’s spokesman today said of Trump’s trial: “If we speak about Trump, the fact that there is simply the elimination, in effect, of political rivals by all possible means, legal and illegal, is obvious.” Hungary’s dictator Viktor Orbán and Italy’s neofascist Deputy Prime Minister, Matteo Salvini, both also argued that Trump is the victim of political persecution.
Right wing media commentators and Republicans in Congress have leaped at the opportunity to echo Putin and Orbán. This sort of propaganda is called “irregular warfare” (IW) — warfare by means outside of troops, bombs, navies, etc. — and the US used to be an expert at it.
Typically, irregular warfare involves the use of propaganda, proxies, or people willing to betray their own country. READ: Liberals are being way too cynical about Trump's conviction Irregular warfare is part of how the US and western Europe brought down the Soviet Union (although that system also disintegrated from within under the weight of its own corruption and rot), with propaganda systems like the Voice of America, Radio Liberty, and Radio Free Europe . A keen observer of this process was an irregular warfare leader based in East Germany at the t.
