Anyway, riling people up for your own entertainment is both contemptible and far too mainstream at the moment. Rod Liddle has had a newspaper column out of it for decades. As have the Sp!ked magazine lot.
If all trolling means is angrying up the masses, then I guess Mussolini and Juan Perón and Bernie Sanders are all fabulous trolls.
Traditional propaganda wants to be true, it wants to persuade you that what it saying is the truth. It bombards you with consistent messages that, repeated often enough, become true in the collective conscience. That’s the classic XX-century playbook.
Modern techniques are not meant to expose a consistent truth. Statements are often retracted or modified (“i was misinterpreted”). The real aim is to generate an immediate fightback, a virtual altercation, so that your side can claim to be a victim of “the system”; to force opponents into arguments that are based on false premises (and hence “unwinnable”) but that enable dogwhistling your sentiment to people; and to manipulate the media into covering these arguments rather than more substantive issues, effectively performing a DDOS on the capacity of regular people to be informed.
Modern politicians like Trump and Berlusconi thrive on the opposition arguing their proclamations as they were traditional propaganda, because it ends up amplifying the subtexts that establish an emotional bond with their electorate. Truth does not matter (“enough of experts”), not even establishing truth matters; what matters is triggering the response you want out of your opposition, which cascades into positive electoral effects by counterpoint. That’s very troll-like.
Some of these techniques are not entirely new, of course, but they seem to have become the principal instruments of political action now, and that’s novel.
Trump does it precisely for that reason. You can see his trolling spiking when he has to divert attention from bad news. Most of his activity is basically 50/50 between "energize base by creating outrage that feeds into victim narrative" and "define what news media will talk about next".
It's not particularly original, Berlusconi did it too (albeit with more traditional means).