America looks — and feels — a lot different today than it did six years ago, when Donald Trump was running for president for the first time. One thing that hasn’t changed, however, is Russia’s interest in our democracy, along with their wish to see sh*t-disturbing Republicans like Trump in office in order to create a more chaotic United States.
As The Daily Beast reports, Dmitry Abzalov, director of the Center for Strategic Communications, appeared on Russian state TV on Tuesday and confirmed that: “Of course we depend on the U.S. elections. Anyone who is doubting that should take a look at today’s dominating news topics. Every field commander is reporting that they’re plugged into American elections, planning to watch them at night. Why would they need to watch if everything was decided over here?”
It’s a fair, albeit disheartening, question. But Abzalov is hardly the only Kremlin mouthpiece saying the quiet part out loud.
Andrey Sidorov, Moscow State University’s deputy dean of world politics, has been a fiercely vocal opponent of Joe Biden and his desire to see Russia come to the table to negotiate with Ukraine following Putin’s invasion of the country back in February. Which he made clear over the weekend while appearing as a guest on Kremlin TV’s Sunday Evening With Vladimir Solovyov.
After sharing a clip of Trump launching a verbal attack on Biden, Solovyov described the former president as a “smart person who openly says everything that many Americans are thinking.”
But it was Sidorov who really brought the point home when he explained that part of their affinity for Trump is the discord that follows him. “We couldn’t care less how they feel about each other,” he said, referring to Trump’s critics. “But Trump generates a lot of hatred in America’s society. From my standpoint, the more they hate each other, the better it is for us.”
And if that wasn’t enough to convince viewers of exactly how Russian lawmakers feel about American chaos, perhaps Sergei Luzyanin, a professor at the Moscow State Institute of International Relations under the Russian Foreign Ministry, said it best when he basically described Russia as the Michael Jackson eating popcorn GIF:
“After the midterm elections, we’ll see a glass jar full of poisonous American spiders, tearing each other up. Go ahead and eat one another! It will be a frightening political process… It may also lead to tactical or strategic changes in their foreign policy… Get lots of popcorn and let’s watch.”
(Via The Daily Beast)