as a place riven by hypocrisy, racism, and prejudice, and the primary source of global injustice. This book’s narrative is chronological, and the story rotates back and forth between Russia and ISIS, a structure that reflects the reality of my job. I tell the story in real time with the knowledge I had at the time.
And then, two-thirds of the way through my time fighting these battles, Donald Trump entered the American presidential race, and it felt like everything suddenly connected. The information battles we were fighting far away had come home. Trump employed the same techniques of disinformation as the Russians and much the same scare tactics as ISIS. Russian propagandists had been calling Western media “fake news” long before Donald Trump. The Russian disinformation techniques we saw around the annexation of Crimea and the invasion of Ukraine were transposed to the American election space. Only this time, they were done in English—pretty poor English mostly—not Russian. For ISIS, Trump’s candidacy confirmed all that they had been saying about the Islamophobia of the United States and the West. Trump’s “Muslim ban” was propaganda gold for ISIS. All three of them—ISIS, Putin, and Trump—weaponized the grievances of people who felt left out by modernity and globalization. In fact, they used the same playbook: ISIS sought to Make Islam Great Again; Putin yearned to Make Russia Great Again; and we know about Mr. Trump. The weaponization of grievance is the unified field theory behind the rise of nationalism and right-wing strongmen.
I found that there was a malign chain of cause and effect among the three. In fighting Assad and seizing territory in Syria, ISIS helped create an exodus of Syrian refugees, millions of whom made their way to Europe. Putin’s indiscriminate bombing in Syria accelerated that mass relocation. Then Russia, through disinformation, helped weaponize the idea of immigration by stoking fears of refugees and terrorism. And along came Donald Trump, who made the fear of immigration a central part of his campaign.
I see that very clearly now, but did I see it then? Not really. Did anyone in the U.S. government see it? I’m not sure. If people did see it, they didn’t talk about it, and not much was done about it. I’m not sure how much we could have done anyway.
Every scene in the book is designed to show how both Russia and ISIS weaponized information and grievance; how Russian disinformation entered the American election; how Donald Trump weaponized grievance and used many of the same techniques and strategies as Russia and ISIS did; how government isn’t much good at responding to a threat like this. In many ways, the fight against ISIS’s messaging looks like a success story. We actually did a fair amount, and ISIS went from seeming omnipresent on social media to being confined to the dark web. But the truth is, I don’t know that what we did made any difference. Crushing ISIS militarily had a heck of a bigger effect than dueling with tweets. As I used to tell my military colleagues, losing a city to ISIS sends a terrible message, but taking a city is the best message of all. Ultimately, it’s not a military fight; it’s a battle of ideas between Islamic extremists and the much larger audience of mainstream Muslims. ISIS was always more of an idea than a state, and that idea is far from dead.
The fight against Russian disinformation was murkier. It was difficult to get started, didn’t gain much traction, and then mostly faded away. Combating Russian disinformation was harder than countering ISIS in part because everyone agreed that ISIS was an irredeemable enemy, while lots of people at State and the White House were ambivalent about hitting back at Russia. Some of that hesitance came from people who didn’t think it was the government’s job to counter any kind of disinformation, which is a fair point. Some of it came from people who thought that countering Russia’s message only made things worse. And some came from people who felt that it was more effective to treat Russia as a fellow superpower (even though it was not) than a fading regional player.
But the scale of Russian disinformation was beyond what we were capable of responding to. The Russians had the big battalions; we had a reluctant, ragtag guerrilla force. They also had the element of surprise. Maybe a few old Cold Warriors might have seen it coming, but mostly we did not. It hadn’t been all that long since the 2012 election when people had mocked Mitt Romney for saying that a revanchist Russia was our number one geopolitical foe. Frankly, it’s not that they were so sophisticated, it’s that we were so credulous. The Global Engagement Center, created during my final year and designed to be a centralized hub for countering all kinds of disinformation, is potentially a powerful weapon in this fight.
Finally, when it came to countering Donald Trump’s disinformation, we were pretty much paralyzed. No one wanted to do that. Let me correct that: plenty of people wanted to do it, but almost no one thought it was practical or right or legal to do so. Moreover, everyone at the White House and at the State Department thought, Well, Hillary is going to win, and the White House really didn’t want it to look like we were putting our finger on the scale. After all, the Russians and Trump were preparing to question the integrity of the election when Trump lost. No one wanted to give them any evidence they could use to say the election was rigged, which is precisely what they would have done.
For the first six weeks after Donald Trump entered the race in June 2015, Russia did almost nothing to support him. The Russians seemed as bewildered as the rest of us at what he was doing. They were always and resolutely anti-Hillary, but it took them a while to become pro-Trump. They were reading the polls too. When they did come around to supporting him, it was pretty clear they didn’t think he would win. What they wanted was a loss close enough that they could question the legitimacy of Mrs. Clinton’s victory. They were as surprised by Trump’s victory as, well, Trump was.
I saw Russian disinformation enter the American presidential campaign and was alarmed by it, but to this day, I’m not sure what impact it had. Russian messaging had a lot of reach but hardly any depth. Sure, Russian ads and stories on Facebook reached 126 million people, but those 126 million people saw exponentially more content than a few Russian ads.10 Moreover, as data today suggests, the ads themselves were not very successful. People didn’t recall them or act on them. What had a more significant effect was the false and deceptive content that the Russians seeded onto all platforms, not just the buying of ads on Facebook. But in the end, disinformation tends to confirm already held beliefs; it’s not really meant to change people’s minds. Disinformation doesn’t create divisions; it amplifies them.
So, did Russian disinformation tip the election to Donald Trump? I don’t know. By televising hundreds of hours of Trump’s campaign speeches, CNN did a whole lot more to elect him than Russia Today did. Televising his rallies sent a message to voters: this is important, pay attention—after all, we are. And millions of voters’ deeply held antipathy to Hillary Clinton did a lot more to defeat her than a few hundred Russian trolls in St. Petersburg. The Russians sought to sow doubt about the election, hurt Hillary, and help Trump, without any expectation that it would tip the balance.
My experience in government changed my view of the information and media industry in a fundamental way. As a journalist, I had always seen information as the lifeblood of democracy. That’s how the Framers saw it too.11 Like so many, I saw the rise of the internet as a fantastic boon to global freedom and democracy—the more knowledge people had, the better able they would be to choose how to govern themselves and live their own lives. I still do. But these new tools and platforms are neutral. As Aristotle said of rhetoric, it can be used for good or ill. I came to see that dictators and autocrats and con men quickly figured out how to use these new tools to fool and intimidate people. They used the tools of democracy and freedom to repress democracy and freedom. We need to use those same tools to protect those values.
I had always believed in the notion that the best ideas triumph in what Justice William O. Douglas called “the market place of ideas.”12 This notion is found in John Milton and John Stuart Mill and is a bedrock principle in our democracy. But everyone presumed that the marketplace would be a level playing field. That a rational audience would ultimately see the truth. I think we all now know that this is a pipe dream. Unfortunately, facts don’t come highlighted in yellow. A false sentence reads the same as a true one. It’s not enough to battle falsehood
