It wasn't disinformation - it is a pedophile who had minors delivered into his bed and was filmed during the atrocities. The resulting child pornography is what makes orange guy the lap dog of a psychotic killer.
The rest was easy with an asset that high in the ranks.
The current situation is really nice for countries like Russia, Saudi-Arabia and China. They just need to pay a few billion to Trump and get stuff that cannot be bought and are easily worth hundreds of billions from the US empire.
It could be either of those things certainly, but I feel like no amount of money Russia could provide would be enough for Trump, he's in control of the United States Treasury and can direct money anywhere with impunity (see also: Starlink). If they came out with a video he'd just call it fake - particularly in this age of AI - and it would have zero effect.
Russians throw people out windows all the time though. I'd be willing to bet that the threat of physical harm is all that is necessary to control him.
Or quite possibly, all three things. Keep us happy and the money keeps flowing, the porn stays in the vault and you won't be unalived.
It was mostly disinformation though, if you look at how most of the social media, and MSMs ran, it's mostly talking points from Russia in some form another
Because once you give into blackmail, that just opens to door to further blackmail. And every single time you give in, it makes it worse and worse. At this point, yeah Trump could get his base to arm wave away him fucking minors. But then he'd have to explain away every thing he's done for them since then, which is just treasonous.