My upcoming book Leveraging Populism will effectively be a criminal profile and statement of probable cause describing how Russian Intelligence agencies were able to infiltrate the Republican Party of the United States, effectively turning most of the modern GOP into a Russian asset, and exerting a frightening amount of control over American political discourse.

That influence was leveraged using a four part approach that involved the study of “pseudo-conservative” movements in the United States and the Paranoid Style of rhetoric (this was the topic of my first book, the Perpetual Hamster Wheel of Stupidity), the other three parts of that approach involved the infiltration of the Council for National Policy – a prominent conservative activist group that is connected to a network of “astroturfing” operations, use of social media targeting technologies executed with the cooperation of Facebook executives, and the demagoguery of Donald J. Trump.

This four part approach represents a departure from those who wish to portray Trumpism as a recent development. Russian infiltration of the Council for National Policy appears to have begun in earnest during the Bush Administration, when former CNP Executive Paul Weyrich, began making a series of trips to Russia and began calling for an alliance between American Evangelicals, and conservative movements in Eastern Europe. The overtures initiated by Mr. Weyrich eventually led to the Russian government sending a series of “good will ambassadors”, such as Maria Butina, who was deeply involved in NRA lobbying programs, and was able to establish relations with a number of leaders in conservative social circles in Washington DC.

Several years later, Mark Zuckerberg, the founder of Facebook began making trips to Russia and meeting with various Russian diplomats, including a 2012 meeting with former Russian Prime Minister Dmitry Medvedev, who was hand-picked by Vladimir Putin and is largely viewed as suboordinate to Putin. Zuckerberg is said to have viewed Russia as a “key market” for Facebook’s expansion, and it is currently unknown exactly what kinds of agreements Zuckerberg may have made with the Russian government. It is also interesting that after Facebook began negotiations with Russian leadership, that we’ve recently learned that Zuckerberg exempted right wing media outlets from rules intended to prevent the posting false and salacious claims on the Facebook platform.

Trump may have just been a handy puppet. He was never in charge of Russian influence operations and just happened to be the Carnival barker who could shamelessly deliver the radicalizing and destabilizing propaganda that the Russians knew would appeal to American conservatives. Trump’s behaviors are nothing new. Trumpism is just a recycling of the same paranoia that America saw with Father Coughlin in the 1930s, the America First movement of the 1940s, McCarthyism in the 1950s, and Bircherism in the 1960s. We should ignore the social media pundits and lazy journalists who say things like “this is unlike anything anyone’s ever seen before, we’re in a completely new territory and just trying to figure things out.” Trumpism follows a very well established pattern.

I can’t go into all the details in this brief summary, but our criminal profile suggests that Russian Intelligence agencies studied the paranoid style of rhetoric that has been a staple of “psuedoconservative” movements in the US over the course of the last century. They leveraged the desire for control that is a common feature of right wing fundamentalist organizations, and the utilized the greed of a pair of unscrupulous businessmen – one who provided them with a social media platform that allowed them to inject agitative propaganda into the American public like a syringe, and another who was the ideal “hype-man” who would aggressively, and shamelessly feed agitative and destabilizing political rhetoric to the masses. It is now time for Democrats in Washington to accept this reality, stop pretending that “it’s not really that bad”, and begin aggressively investigating and prosecuting corrupted GOP leaders to the fullest extent of the law.