If not Kremlin, Then Who Brought Trump to Power?

For months we’ve been seeing titles like “Kremlin brought Trump to power”, “Moscow interferes in the internal affairs of other states”, but it seems that Western media sources have a never-ending supply of those. But to make the matters worse, similar statements are now being voiced by all sorts of politicians, that in this recent Russia-bashing campaign are desperate to score at least few points.

It came to the point that mislead readers are getting outraged with any European or American political figure that is being accused of having connections with Russia, even though other political figures may have a track record of supporting terrorists, yet they still get no condemnation.

It matters not that all the recent anti-Russian accusations have been supported by no actual facts, since the Western media decided to turn a deaf ear to Western intelligence agencies all saying that the so-called Russia’s meddling is nothing but fake news. Those behind this hysteria are only interested in creating a united front against Russia, in order to receive a handsome reward from the likes of Soros by getting as many supporters as they can. We are seeing attempts to start the same-old Cold War, which would make Western military contractors pretty happy since they’ve got used to stealing social security’s cash a long while ago.

We’ve seen it all before, but what remains unclear is that if Kremlin didn’t bring Trump to power, then who did?

Let’s take a brief look at the two m supporting pillars that had been carrying Trump’s presidential campaign from day one. One of them is Steve Bannon, the former editor in chief and co-founder of the Breitbart News. This principal Western strategist was born in a family of Irish Catholics, that were avid supporters of the Democratic Party. He received a bachelor’s degree in urban planning, and then went to serve in the navy and rose to the position of the chief of staff in the Pentagon. After singing his resignation, Bannon received a master’s degree and soon got employed by Goldman Sachs, only to become a film producer. In 1990, Bannon, along with several colleagues at Goldman Sachs, opened their own investment bank Bannon & Co, which offered customers investments in media projects.

The other pillar that supported Trump throughout his campaign was the multimillionaire Robert Mercer, who proudly occupied the third place among the largest donors to Trump in the pre-election period. He’s an executive director of the investment fund Reinaissance Technologies. In 2011, Mercer invested 10 million dollars in the above mentioned Breitbart News.

In just 10 years the news portal Breitbart News has become a media phenomenon, having the largest number of supporters in Facebook and Twitter among all media sites.

It should be recalled that it is those two social network played a pivotal role in Trump’s victory. To promote his cause on Facebook, Trump invested 56 million dollars, while twitting in his personal account every once in a while.

To better understand what role Bannon and Mercer along with their social networks skills played in Trump’s victory, we should recall that Western IT firms have been collecting the so-called Big Data for a long time. After all, all that we are doing in today’s world, both on the Internet in our regular life leaves a digital trail. Purchases made with credit cards, Google search inputs, a walk we took with a smartphone in your pocket, our activities in social networks – all of this is being recorded. For a long time no one could figure out how this information could be used – except for the targeted adds we regularly see on Facebook.

We can now safely state that Trump’s campaign was a success due to the fact that he took advantage of the Big Data and the company that explores – Cambridge Analytica. This company specializes in a new form of political marketing – the so-called microtargeting – based on the OCEAN methodology. When Trump hired Cambridge Analytica back in June 2016, analysts in Washington took this step with a grain of salt, but the end result was impressive. This company was purchasing all sorts of personal information about future voters, starting with newspaper subscriptions a person may have and ending with medical record. After all, you can obtain most any information about a person in the US these days. Then Cambridge Analytica then added this data to the list of registered Republican supporters and the information about their behavior in social networks. Thus, Trump knew exactly what he was supposed to say to please his voters. This OCEAN approach has been the reason behind the Senator Ted Cruz’s breathtaking start of the campaign. By the way, in late 2014 Cambridge Analytica was assisting Ted Cruz in every way possible, since he was sponsored by the same billionaire Robert Mercer …

The Swiss Das Magazin magazine has published a pretty detailed investigation about how the Big Data affected both the Brexit vote and the latest US Presidential election.

Jean Périer is an independent researcher and analyst and a renowned expert on the Near and Middle East, exclusively for the online magazine “New Eastern Outlook”