" The IRA studied Americans to understand what made them angry, to learn how to think and speak and write like them and, in the fullness of time, to spearhead a new kind of political warfare against the United States. “Our task,” one of the Saint Petersburg trolls later told a Russian reporter, “was to set Americans against their own government: to provoke unrest and discontent.” From the outset, the mission was to incite a civil war within the American political system. "

― Tim Weiner , The Folly and the Glory: America, Russia, and Political Warfare 1945–2020