Revealed: how the Donald Trump campaign and Russia conspired to rig Michigan and Wisconsin
In the 2016 election, Donald Trump suspiciously “won” multiple key swing states where the polls consistently said he was losing, and whose voting demographics should have made it impossible for him to win. The two most glaring near-impossibilities were Michigan and Wisconsin. We’ve known for some time that the Trump campaign and Russia conspired on some level to rig the election. Now we know how they specifically worked to rig the two states in question.
We now know that Russia was running Facebook ads which specifically targeted voters in Michigan and Wisconsin, thanks to a new CNN report (link). Facebook turned over the ads in question to Congress on Monday, and as Palmer Report predicted at the time, details about the ads have quickly leaked out accordingly. These ads fed fake political news to key targeted voters in those states who were believed to have been on the fence and most susceptible to falling for the misleading ads. Moreover, we can now pair this new evidence with existing evidence from the past year, to piece together how Russia and the Trump campaign were working together in those states.
Weeks after the election, a Bloomberg article revealed that Paul Manafort had told Donald Trump shortly before election day that he needed to go campaign in Michigan (link). This was an absurd piece of advice, as Trump had virtually no chance of winning the state, and there were other swing states he logically should have been spending his time in instead. But sure enough, Trump took Manafort’s advice, despite having fired him from the campaign months earlier. We’ve since learned that Manafort was deeply in debt to a Kremlin oligarch, and had been using his position as Trump campaign chair to try to wipe out his debts.
In hindsight, it’s all but a given that Russia told its puppet Paul Manafort to tell Donald Trump to go campaign in Michigan. This was at the same time Russia was running Facebook ads which aimed to mislead those same Michigan voters.. So there’s the election-rigging conspiracy between Russia and the Trump campaign right there. Further, Trump took Manafort’s advice and spent significant time in Michigan. It’s difficult to believe Manafort could have convinced Trump to do something so nonsensical, unless Manafort explained to Trump why the door was open in Michigan. That would make Trump himself guilty of conspiring with Russia to rig the election.
