I regularly see trots being memed about because "they do nothing apart from writing newspapers", but to me from their viewpoint (and as an anarchist) it totally makes sense and is a sympathetic view how it should be the workers leading the fight towards a revolution and the vanguard should stand aside and take the role of advisors (hence the newspapers) rather than leaders.
I feel like i'm missing something but i don't know what.
If Trotsky was the leader of the Soviet project they would have likely collapsed in a war against the west in the 1930s. The Trotskyist wing could not accept the loss of Western Europe to capitalisms, and seemed determined to wage on offensive war.
His response of how to give the workers power seems like a material idea of him losing power to Stalin’s CPSU and making up a “correct” path of communist revolution to make the “true” communists himself and his followers.