Nikonov Admits On Live Television That Russia Rigged U.S. Election

This is amusing.

If you follow geopolitics, you’re aware that Russian officials quite enjoy trolling America on social media and really, every chance they get in a public forum. The grand master of this is the deadpan Sergei Lavrov and his number 2, the incomparable Maria Zakharova, is pretty adept at it as well.

Well, in an apparent attempt to poke fun at the U.S., Russian politician Vyacheslav Nikonov seems to have accidentally admitted that Moscow rigged the U.S. election on national television.

In a segment on “Sunday Evening with Vladimir Solovyov,” Nikonov said the following:

Basically, this:

Intelligence missed it when Russian intelligence stole the president of the United States.

The point was to underscore the notion that America’s hegemony is waning. Because after all, how omniscient can you be when you allow another country’s intelligence apparatus to hijack your election with a couple of Facebook ads? More to the point, how safe is your democracy when large swaths of the electorate are so gullible that they can be duped into electing a geriatric reality TV show host to the highest office on the planet?

“His point in making the remark was that if the U.S. can’t protect the integrity of its own electoral system, then how powerful can it really be?” University of Virginia professor Allen Lynch told The Hill via email, adding that “Nikonov was less stating the extent of Russia’s involvement in the 2016 election, and more mocking the resulting chaos as emblematic of U.S. weakness.”

Actually we’d like to thank Vyacheslav for the effort because it’s pretty clear that most Americans still don’t understand how ignorant they really are.