Foreign bot chaos leaves democracy on life support

Russian influence over Trump, and the way it’s managed to trash American democracy, still blows my mind every time I think about it. There’s this whole tangled mess - Trump’s got years of ties to Russian oligarchs, and Jeffrey Epstein’s money trail runs right through Russian hands too, which people say was all about collecting kompromat for leverage. Then you’ve got Israeli intelligence (Mossad) hovering around the edges of this stew. Meanwhile, Russian-run bot farms are cranking out nonstop propaganda on social media, making it look like the MAGA movement is some unstoppable grassroots force when it’s actually a lot of fake accounts and relentless noise. Most Americans don’t realize that something like 75% of us are on social media daily, and those bot farms flood the conversation - they drown out criticism of Trump, especially anything linking him to Epstein, because that’s leverage they want to keep quiet. But try bringing any of this up, and the only rebuttal you’ll ever hear is “no proof,” while the rest gets buried under rants about China or the border. People act like none of this matters, even though we literally have the Mueller Report - hundreds of pages - and a 900-page Senate Intelligence Committee report (released by Republicans, no less) spelling out how Russian intelligence attacked the 2016 election and how Trump and his circle enabled it. But instead of actually reading any of it, half the country just took Bill Barr’s four-page “summary” at face value, which was basically a PR stunt to clear Trump before the real report even dropped. The courts, Congress, and the Supreme Court all dragged their feet on any real consequences, so we ended up with an attempted coup on January 6, and somehow Trump is still allowed to run for president after that. It’s like the whole system just gave up trying to hold him or his party accountable, even as the evidence of foreign compromise and corruption piled up. The wildest part is how fragile American democracy turned out to be - all those checks and balances, all that faith in the honor system, and it turns out it only works if people actually care. Instead, you’ve got Americans parroting Russian talking points, huge chunks of the country treating knowledge like an optional hobby, and Trump and his cronies getting embarrassingly rich while the country slides closer to being North American Belarus. This is where we’re at: grift everywhere you look, foreign leverage over the White House, bot farms shaping public opinion, and a democracy held together by duct tape and wishful thinking. What a time to be alive.