Just read this rather informative article in the National, with which, perhaps because of my confirmation bias, I agreed wholeheartedly. The crux of the matter is that the scope, dimensions and effect of the Russian Internet campaign had been exaggerated dramatically by the press, despite its overall modest ambitions. According to the scientific data, their funds were actually limited (ironically, Russian experts suspect that the main goal of the Research Agency is to leech the budget of the Ministry for insignificant and doomed-to-fail projects), their tactics amateurish and the content of their message was more prone to generate controversy and discord than support for a specific candidate. These observations directly contradict the mainstream narrative Saint Petersburg-originated advertisement generating millions of clicks in social media and manipulating hundreds of thousands of innocent voters.
However, in my opinion, although the numbers are accurate, their interpretation is misleading, either due to malevolent intentions or because of many journalists' genuine incapacity to understand statistics. In the vast world of Facebook and Twitter, where so many users interact with each other, numbers with a long series of zeroes may not actually be as impressive as they superficially look. Moreover, there's also the question of the demographics that get access to these messages and actually endorse them. I personally doubt that anyone else than the most fanatical Republicans would believe that Obama is an Islamist Bolshevik or that liberals run a pederasty ring in the basement of a pizza restaurant. These wild stories are usually only able to satisfy the prejudices and intensify the polarisation of the already most radicalised segments of the society. Meanwhile, moderate citizens, whose votes actually determine the results of the presidential elections are much less vulnerable to such obvious attempts at slander and fear-mongering.
The same conclusion applies to more direct initiatives of the Russian state authorities, like the leaking of the private communication between Hillary Clinton and her associates. The Spirit Cooking controversy gained a lot of publicity, but then again, was any potential Democrat supporter truly convinced that a cabal of cosmopolitan progressives bake immaterial concepts like pain and feasted on body fluids? Similarly fascist activists may have been very active in isolated corners of the net, but their frog memes were hardly visible or digestible to more mainstream and aged voters, who did not frequent 4chan, Stormfront and the tweeting account of Richard Spencer and Yaxley Lennon.
So, why was the contribution of Russia and the Pepe fandom grown out of proportions? As Aaron Maté suggests, the principal culprit is probably the establishment of the Democratic Party. Blaming the Kremlin and the dregs of the American society is a very convenient tactic of absolving yourself of any responsibility for the unexpected defeat. Simultaneously, it also achieves to demonise the opposition, as it presents them as totally dependent on foreign interference and the "lumpenproletariat". Especially the former is a pretty dangerous trend, when it occurs in the supposedly more tolerant part of the political spectrum, as it can gradually devolve into thinly veiled xenophobia and war-mongering. Meanwhile, Russia and the marginalised right-wing extremists exploited and encouraged the scapegoating narrative, in order for the first to enhance their international prestige as a tech-savvy government and for the second to reinforce their fragile self-confidence.
Unfortunately for the Democrats, accusing the others and refusing to recognize your mistakes may have negative repercussions in the long-term, as the most serious obstacles are never addressed. For example, Hillary's popularity was notoriously frail, because she was lacking terribly in charisma (the ills of nepotism, I suppose), while she was also perceived as the epitome of establishment politics and a continuation of her predecessor's largely disappointing record in the crucial issues of wage stagnation, income inequality and etc.. Moreover, citizens who either abstained or who voted reluctantly for Donald, in the vain hope of a billionaire magnate draining the marsh, are alienated by the deeply condescending nature of the Democratic strategy of interpreting their losses as the consequence of manipulation, instead of genuine discontent.