Post-modernism laid the groundwork for an ‘I have my facts and you have yours’ culture. Or call it ‘my ignorance is just as good as your knowledge’. Community has been replaced by an atomised screen time facing our individual echo chambers. Decades of neoliberalism has impoverished swathes of the population, materially and intellectually. There are many chickens coming home to roost.
Yeah there is no doubt that any serious intelligence service will have been all over Trump and anybody connected to him from 2020 onwards. Inviting randoms into signal groups, leaving classified documents piled up out in the open, are very public evidence of what will have been rampant private weakness, that will have been exploited everywhere, by everyone. And so yes the likes of China will have known exactly what was coming in Trump 2 as soon as these plans were formed. Probably before Trump did.