Trump seems to keep siding with Russia, but what does that get him?

We’ll soon see how supportive of U.S. intelligence Trump really is. But in recent months, his approach to the hacking story has been worryingly similar to Russia’s own response: It’s all lies, circulated by a dishonest media. Nobody can believe anything.

This sort of information fog is precisely what Moscow seeks to spawn in its own propaganda campaigns. The Russian goal is “to corrode democratic norms and institutions by discrediting the electoral process and to tarnish the reputations of democratic governments in order to establish a kind of moral equivalence between Russia and the West,” Thorsten Benner and Mirko Hohmann wrote last month in Foreign Affairs.

Anyone who thinks that the Russian hacking charges are simply an attempt to belittle or discredit Trump should study Russia’s current covert-action campaign in Europe. Benner and Hohmann quote Bruno Kahl, the chief of Germany’s intelligence service, who told a newspaper there that “cyberattacks are taking place that have no purpose other than to elicit uncertainty.” The head of French information security similarly warned last month that Western countries face “the development of a digital threat for political ends and for destabilization.”