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Filmmaker Maxim Pozdorovkin said Donald Trump “fitted neatly” into an anti-Western Kremlin narrative.
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He said Trump was portrayed as the only American leader who did not “try to destroy the Russian way of life”.
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He described Russia as “completely and artfully” waging an information war over the past decade.
A filmmaker who has extensively documented Russian propaganda this week said that of all US leaders, former President Donald Trump “fitted neatly” into the Kremlin’s anti-Western narrative.
In an interview with The Washington Post, Maxim Pozdorovkin — whose award-winning documentary “Our New President” follows Trump’s 2016 election, as portrayed by Russia’s state-affiliated media — gave his take on Moscow’s long-standing propaganda campaign against the US and the West.
Pozdorovkin told The Post that in the decade leading up to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russians had “over and over again” received the same message from President Vladimir Putin’s administration that the West was constantly trying to “suffocate and destroy” their society. He said Trump “fits neatly” into Moscow’s propaganda efforts because he could be portrayed as the “one American leader who did not try to destroy the Russian way of life”.
In the context of that story, Pozdorovkin said, the domestic backlash Trump has faced in the US — regardless of the real reason — could be framed as fueled by anti-Russian interests.
“It’s been an information war — a totally one-sided information war — and it’s been waged so completely and artfully that much of what’s happening now has been preemptively made possible,” he told the outlet.
“The Russian media has been completely shadow boxing for years; nobody fought back,” he said later in the interview. “But that doesn’t really matter. When you integrate this message of victimization so fully, what it does is when there’s any kind of Putin aggressive action, like now, a lot of people in Russia don’t see it as aggressive.
“They just see it as standing up for their way of life.”
Trump and Putin met five times during Trump’s presidency, although details of these meetings were covered in secret, as The New York Times reported in 2019. presidency.
Amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Trump has made several statements about Putin and Russia.
Recently, Trump said that if he were still president, he would send nuclear submarines to “go up and down” Russia’s coast to pressure Putin. He also suggested in a speech to Republican donors that the US put Chinese flags on its fighter jets to “bomb Russia out of shit”.
Shortly before the invasion, Trump praised Putin’s justification for sending his troops to Ukraine, calling the Russian leader “clever,” “clever” and a “genius.”
Read the original article on Business Insider
