Collusion: Secret Meetings, Dirty Money, and How Russia Helped Donald Trump Win

by Luke Harding

The bots in conjunction with the leaked emails and the Facebook ads fueled an anger that Trump voters already felt toward Clinton. As General Hayden, the former NSA director, put it, the divisions in U.S. society ran deep. Trump modeled himself on Andrew Jackson, the United States’ seventh president, whose portrait he hung in the Oval Office. Jackson was an outsider and a white nationalist, who viewed the United States as a nation, a Volk, a narod, Hayden said, citing the German and Russian equivalents. Those who supported Clinton took another view. For them, the United States was an Enlightenment idea, rather than a chunk of land that belonged exclusively to one ethnic group. It was best expressed by Alexander Hamilton, President Woodrow Wilson, and the dictum: “We, the People.” The Hamiltonian approach was fact-based, humble in the face of complexity, and respectful of evidence, Hayden said. None of which applied to Trump’s incoming White House.