Trump Hopes For Repeat Of 2016 Winning Campaign Of Smoke, Lies
On eve of the so-called presidential debate, the issue is that trump tried to shred the constitution and declare himself dictator, everything else is just noise.
Trump should be disqualified from running for any office, even dog catcher. He is like the convicted pedophile who applies for a job at a child care center and asks that his past be overlooked.
Apparently an ever-growing number of Americans think a past record of crime is no impediment to being the leader of the free world.
The latest poll shows that 53 percent of Republicans are convinced that the 2020 election was rigged and that trump was indeed, robbed. And another poll shows that many Americans believe trump would better handle threats to democracy than Biden.
That was the opinion of a bit more than half the voters who will likely decide the presidential election in six swing states, according to a poll by The Washington Post and the Schar School of Policy and Government at George Mason University who surveyed 3,513 registered voters in six key states in this year’s presidential election: Arizona, Georgia, Michigan, Nevada, Pennsylvania and Wisconsin.
Biden has been factual in charging that trump is a threat to democracy, from his voter fraud claims to the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol attack to trump’s vows to prosecute his enemies in a campaign of “retribution.” Trump has flipped the blame and said that Biden is the real threat to democracy because the president allegedly has weaponized the judicial system to charge trump and his allies in multiple criminal cases.
Trump’s claims continue to gain traction as the trump-MAGA-GOP disinformation campaign clicks into overdrive.
A common trump theme for 2024 is that President Joe Biden is mentally unfit for office. Maia Bartiromo, a Fox Business Network host, is out in front of the conspiracy campaign in exactly the same way as in 2020 when Fox News tried to sell trump’s lies about widespread voter fraud.
Bartiromo had Rep. Greg Murphy, R-N.C., on her show and glowed when Murphy suggested that Biden might “take something to enhance his performance” in the upcoming debate. Murphy used his training as a urologist to conclude that Biden “must have been jacked up” during his State of the Union address in March and that “they gave him something.” Of course no evidence was offered.
During the 2020 presidential campaign, Murphy claimed on Twitter that Biden “obviously is fighting the ravages of dementia.” He told an inquiring reporter that he had no evidence and was only repeating what the public thinks.
“The majority of American people believe he does have dementia”, Murphy said.
Fox News host Jesse Watters pitched in after Biden’s energetic March 7 address to say, “I’m not a doctor, but they’re giving him something.” Watters added that “something has been added to the mix” and that Biden should “pee in a cup.”
A month later, with the Internet trolls humming, trump suggested that Biden had taken the cocaine that was found in his White House once last year, calling him “higher than a kite” and pushing for a pre-debate drug test. Trump said Biden “was all jacked up.” He’s been repeating the lies about Biden getting “a shot in the ass” shortly before the debate.
“I say he will come out all jacked up, right?” Trump told MAGA believers at a recent rally in Philadelphia.
Bartiromo also interviewed Rep. Ronny Jackson, R-Texas, another member of the GOP Doctors Caucus. Jackson, who was trump’s chief medical officer before running for congress, discussed what drugs he said Biden could be taking and called it “a national security issue.” Jackson knows about drugs. An inspector general’s report earlier this year pointed to “systemic problems” with how Jackson prescribed drugs in the White House Medical Unit. He also is being looked at for allegedly using campaign funds to pay for a private dining club membership.
After Murphy and Jackson, ophthalmologist Rep. Mariannette Miller-Meeks, R-Iowa, also a member of the GOP Doctors Caucus, joined the tag team to push the Biden isn’t all there theory. Miller-Meeks said colleagues had pointed to the possibility of Biden being on Ritalin or steroids and said “we anticipate that for this first debate, he will be on something, and the response of the press has been to cover it up.”
The GOP Doctors Caucus website says it is comprised of Republican members of Congress with medical and health care provider backgrounds “who utilize their medical expertise and backgrounds to develop patient-centered health care policy.”
Fox News host Sean Hannity has used the phrase “jacked up” multiple times and has said that Biden may have been juiced up on caffein, perhaps the Red Bull energy drink. Former House speaker Newt Gingrich, R-Ga., chimed in that Biden was “propped up by drugs.”
No evidence has been provided about any of the claims about Biden, beyond wild speculation about highly questionable circumstance. But like in 2020, trump and the rest hope that tweets and re-tweets, and re-re-tweets will get the GOP base to buy in.
A column in today’s N.Y. Times by Renee DiResta partially explains how the nation got from a crybaby crying that he was robbed to the point where 53 percent of Republicans are convinced that the election was rigged and that trump was indeed, robbed. DiResta wrote that the domestic rumor mill will be huge factor in the 2024 campaign while networks like Fox and Newsmax continue to spread misinformation “while the networks of researchers and observers who worked to counter them are being dismantled.”
DiResta is the former research director of the Stanford Internet Observatory, a unit of Stanford University that studies abuse of online platforms. She joined with the Election Integrity Partnership to write a study on election rumors and disinformation in the 2020 race. The Election Integrity Partnership was founded in 2020 as a non-partisan coalition to “empower the research community, election officials, government agencies, civil society organizations, social media platforms, and others to defend our elections against those who seek to undermine them by exploiting weaknesses in the online information environment.”
The partnership is a joint effort of the Stanford Internet Observatory and the University of Washington Center for an Informed Public. Its work focused on attempts to suppress voting, reduce participation, confuse voters, or delegitimize election results without evidence.
DiResta explained how the popular theories of “the (election) steal” went viral through the use of suggestive images or videos, like a photo of a “suspicious” suitcase near a polling place. The poster would tweet the purported evidence, and then tag hyperpartisan influencers or media accounts with large followings, a process known as “participatory disinformation.”
“Those accounts would promote the rumor, often claiming, ‘Big if true!’ Others would join and the algorithms would push it out to potentially millions more. Partisan media would follow,” DiResta said.
If the rumor was found to be false as it usually was, corrections were rarely made and even then, little noticed.
Within a few years after the 2020 election, the Trumpian rumor mill turned its fangs on the researchers who had documented the false rumors. The Stanford Internet Observatory was accused of being part of a plot to censor right wing voices. A blogger with an organization calling itself the “Foundation for Freedom Online,” was largely responsible for using early attacks on the Stanford Internet Observatory to bolster the voter fraud claims. The foundation’s director, Mike Benz, said on the group’s website that he was a former State Department official “with responsibilities in formulating and negotiating US foreign policy on international communications and information technology matters.”
“Mr. Benz founded FFO as a civil society institution building on his experience in the role of championing digital freedom around the world in the public sector,” the website claimed.
In fact, Benz had worked at the State Department for just a few months and was known as an alt-right YouTube personality who went by the handle, “Frame Game.” Benz used his brief employment with the State Department to prove his alleged bona fides as a researcher. His blog posts with the Foundation for Freedom Online were styled to resemble legitimate research projects. Benz claimed that the Election Integrity Partnership had pushed social media networks to censor 22 million tweets claiming voter fraud.
DiResta said that Benz offered no firsthand evidence of any censorship but that his number of 22 million tweets was based on a simply tally of viral election rumors that had been researched and refuted after the election.
“Right-wing media outlets and influencers nonetheless called it evidence of a plot to steal the election, and their followers followed suit,” DiResta said.
Student analysts with the Election Integrity Partnership identified social media posts that were potentially misleading the public about voting procedures, or which tried to delegitimize the outcome of an election. Sometimes a nonprofit clearinghouse that included state and local election officials shared posts that concerned them with the clearinghouse. The researchers would check if a post seemed to be going viral and seemed to violate a social media platform’s election policies. In case of potential violations, the clearinghouse notified the platforms.
“Most of the time, the platforms took no action; when they did act, it was primarily to label the post as disputed, or to attach a fact check,” DiResta said.
The disinformation campaign went after the Election Integrity Partnership after Republicans gained control of the House in 2022. Witnesses testified before a House Judiciary subcommittee about the alleged, “22 million tweets.”
The claim about “22 million tweets” was entered into the congressional record and two Republican members of the subcommittee, Rep. Jim Jordan of Ohio and Rep. Dan Bishop of North Carolina, both rabid trump supporters, demanded the Election Integrity Partnership provide correspondence with the executive branch and technology companies about the tweets, as part of the GOP probe into the Biden “censorship regime.”
Subpoenas were issued for further information, requesting staff to submit to close-door video recorded testimonies.
“It was obvious to us what would happen next,” DiResta said. “The documents we turned over would be leaked and sentences cherry-picked to fit a pre-existing narrative. This supposed evidence would be fodder for hyperpartisan influencers, and the process would begin again.”
Material the subcommittee obtained under subpoena or in closed-door hearings found its way to a group led by Jordan’s friend, Stephen Miller, a far right ideologue and former trump advisor and architect of trump’s draconian plans to imprison children of undocumented immigrants.
“This brings us to the present, when another election looms,” DiResta said. “The 2024 rerun is already being viciously fought.”
Adding to the disinformation campaign is the emergence of new social media platforms, such as Bluesky, Threads and trump’s platform, Truth Social. At the same time, DiResta said that “election integrity policies and enforcement priorities are in flux at some of the biggest platforms. What used to be Twitter is under new ownership and most of the team that focused on trust and safety was let go.”
Fake audio generated by artificial intelligence in the U.S. as well as Russia and China is also a growing factor in the disinformation campaigns. For more bad news, DiResta said that trust in institutions, government, media and fellow citizens is at or near record lows and polarization continues to increase.
“Election officials are concerned about the safety of poll workers and election administrators — perhaps the most terrible illustration of the cost of lies on our politics,” she said.
Another aspect of the disinformation campaign is that universities have often remained silent on dubious claims, fearing attacks from the right wing while costs to fight disinformation mounts. For example, Stanford has ended the Election Integrity Partnership’s rapid-response election observation work.
“Republican members of the House Judiciary subcommittee reacted to the Stanford news by saying their ‘robust oversight’ over the center had resulted in a ‘big win’ for free speech,” DiResta said. “This is an alarming statement for government officials to make about a private research institution with First Amendment rights.”
The Election Integrity Partnership report examines three successful disinformation campaigns that morphed into a major source of disinformation to undermine trust in the voting process. Similar efforts should be expected to discredit the 2024 election, if trump loses.
The report shows how hyper-partisan media outlets were led by trump, who repeatedly used his social media accounts and public speaking opportunities to spread false, misleading, and unsubstantiated claims of voter fraud.
@realDonaldTrump tweeted on June 22,2020: “RIGGED 2020 ELECTION: MILLIONS OF MAIL-IN BALLOTS WILL BE PRINTED BY FOREIGN COUNTRIES AND OTHERS.IT WILL BE THE SCANDAL OF OUR TIMES!”
The tweet was one of many social media posts by @realDonaldTrump promoting the false narrative of massive voter fraud. The messages resonated with trump’s followers, setting, for many, a false expectation of election fraud.
As Election Day approached, the trump campaign encouraged followers to join the “Army for Trump” and collect evidence of fraud, providing instructions for serving as poll observers and online forms for supporters to submit evidence of election issues. The report showed that many trump supporters arrived at the polls (and went online) actively searching for evidence to support the election fraud narrative.
One case in point involved ballots submitted in Sonoma, Calif. The rumor first surfaced after a tweet by @ElijahSchaffer, a right-wing reporter for Glenn Beck’s far right media outlet, The Blaze. Schaffer was fired in October 2022 after a co-worker accused him of sexually assaulting her.
Schaffer’s tweet included photos of election materials discovered in a dumpster in Sonoma, claiming that the “ballots” demonstrated the vulnerability of mail-in voting in the 2020 election.
Schaffer tweeted on Sept. 25, 2020: “SHOCKING:1,000+ MAIL IN BALLOTS FOUND IN DUMPSTER IN CALIFORNIA. They were allegedly discovered in the Republic Services of Sonoma County central landfill. The zip code ‘94928’ on the ballots matches the county. These are original photos sent to me. Big if true.”
The rumors proved utterly false. The photo that Schaffer posted on Twitter actually depicted ballot envelopes that were received and processed during the 2018 election, which were being discarded according to guidelines, 22 months after that election.
“But lack of veracity did not stop the misleading claim from spreading widely — 45,000 tweets in the span of about 36 hours,” the report noted.
About five hours after Schaffer’s tweet, the far right wing Gateway Pundit posted an article and accompanying tweet featuring the same photos and claims.
@gatewaypundit posted: “EXCLUSIVE: California Man Finds THOUSANDS of Unopened Ballots in Garbage Dumpster — Workers Quickly Try to Cover Them Up.”
The Gateway Pundit repeatedly pushed false and misleading narratives of voter fraud. Its Twitter account had 302,000 followers on Sept. 25 and grew to more than 460,000 followers before being suspended on Jan. 10, 2021.
Eventually the Sonoma Ballots disinformation reached trump’s son, Donald Jr., who retweeted Schaffer’s original tweet about 10 hours after it was first posted. @DonaldJTrumpJr, with more than 5.6 million followers at the time, was a noted “repeat spreader” of misleading voter fraud claims.
The claim and others alleging voter fraud were further spread by other pro-trump influencers, including Miles Cheong and Michael Coudrey. Coudrey owns YukoSocial, a social media firm specializing in politics. Cheong, a resident of Malaysia, is a gamer and right wing commentator. Since 2017, Cheong has worked for the Daily Caller, a website co-founded by broadcast journalist Tucker Carlson.
After an official correction by Sonoma County and enforcement action by Twitter, the rumor faded but Gateway Pundit continued to publicize the disinformation.
The second case examined was known as “SharpieGate.” The main point of disinformation was that Sharpie pens given to in-person voters on Election Day were bleeding through ballots, which was true, and that the bleed-through caused ballots to be rejected. This is misleading as ballots were rarely rejected and those that were rejected were hand counted using alternative methods.
Sharpie pens were recommended because they dry faster than ink pens, which can smear vote-reading devices.
On Election Day, the earliest wave of voter concerns about Sharpies occurred in Chicago. At 6:31 a.m., a Chicago voter tweeted concern that his precinct’s ballot reader struggled with his Sharpie-marked ballot.
Thirty minutes later, conservative Chicago media personality, Amy Jacobson, told her 25,000 followers to bring their own pens and later tweeted that ballots were mysteriously being placed in a “BOX.” @AmyJacobson tweeted on Nov. 3, 2020: “Ballot scanners aren’t working @lakeViewHS. Voters asked to place ballots in a BOX. If you are voting at Lakeview HS b ring your own black pen! Ballots are double sided and the sharpies they provide are bleeding through. Polling marshall says there’s nothing she can do.”
Jacobson was a reporter with WMAQ-TV before she was fired after a video aired on a rival station of her in a bathing suit with her children at the home of a man she was investigating in connection with his wife’s disappearance.
Jacobson’s tweets were highly retweeted and quoted, representing 46 percent of all Sharpie-related tweets on Election Day. Several users framed Jacobson’s tweet as evidence of voter suppression or voter fraud.
A parallel issue was developing in Arizona, where one tweet implied that Sharpies may have intentionally disenfranchised voters. An early tweet read, “Electioneering? Our policing location provided sharpies to mark our ballots, which bled through. It didn’t affect the back side, BUT there were plenty of stray marks. Several of us complained, the poll workers shrugged their shoulders.” An image embedded in the tweet was a clearly marked Trump vote, inferring it was the assumed target of the alleged conspiracy. The post was retweeted more than 8,400 times by the far right Newsmax.
An Arizona Republican party official later posted an image encouraging voters in Maricopa county to bring their own pens to the polls, while a Republican candidate incorrectly said that ballots were being “canceled” due to Sharpie pen use.
A right-wing political activist in Arizona posted a Facebook video featuring a woman who claimed that election officials were forcing people to use Sharpie pens and causing invalidated votes. The video accumulated more than 4 million views.
One of the leading spreaders of the Sharpie rumor was Charlie Kirk, the founder and president of Turning Point USA, a conservative political organization that spread numerous false and misleading claims of election fraud in 2020.
The day after the election saw a surge of repeat tweets about Sharpie Gate. In an hour and a half, more than 80,000 tweets were recorded, led in large part by Matt Schlapp, chairman of the American Conservative Union with strong ties with trump. Schlapp was sued last year for $9 million for battery and defamation by a former aide to failed U.S. Senate candidate Herschel Walker. The ex-aide alleged that Schlapp sexually assaulted him — groping and fondling his groin area — during a car ride several weeks before the 2022 midterm election.
@mschlapp tweeted: “AZ update: apparently the use of sharpie pens in gop precincts is causing ballots to be invalidated. Could be huge numbers of mostly Trump supporters. More to come.”
Major news outlets later refuted the claims but they were not highly retweeted.
Maria Bartiromo, a Fox host with 850,000 followers, tweeted on Nov. 5, 2020, “AZ poll workers forcing voters to use sharpies thereby invalidated ballots. Trump leading in GA, NC, PA, WI, MI & they stop counting before the vote fairy visits overnight.”
Bartiromo’s tweet was retweeted by Eric trump, who claimed voter “fraud” and called on the FBI to investigate. Others joined in the tweeting, including Tom Fitton, president of Judicial Watch; Rudy Giuliano, Donald trump Jr., trump lawyer Jenna Ellis and former GOP House Speaker Newt Gingrich. Bartiromo’s tweet eventually received 67,000 amplifying engagements.
Finally, there is the MaidenGate conspiracy which claimed that fake Biden votes were cast in swing states using women’ prior legal or maiden names. The theory emerged as a direct result of online political influencers, especially the work of one particular user known as @L.
@L said she was a “data analyst” and wrote a blog that previously spread rumors of the origins of COVID-19 and conspiracy theories about Bill Gates’ involvement; the sex assault trial of Jeffrey Epstein; and Hunter Biden.
From November 4–10, @L posted hundreds of tweets on alleged election issues and voter fraud. Many were retweets of conservative influencers like Fitton, Jack Posobiec and Michelle Malkin.
On Nov. 10, @L posted a series of tweets that ignited the MaidenGate conspiracy theory, including: “My mom literally got her vote stolen in Michigan (they moved) and she JUST NOW THOUGHT TO TELL ME ABOUT IT. FRAUD! VOTER FRAUD AND I CAN PROVE IT BITCHES” and “All I can say while I’m getting this together. . .IF your parents lived in a different state and IF there was a legal name change that happened before they moved, CHECK THEIR VOTER STATUS. Her legal name changed as they moved. MOTHERFUCKERS.”
In another tweet, @L implored GOP voters with “Okay. Here’s what I need you to do. If you are registered to vote and have had a legal name change, check the states you have been registered to vote in under your old name and check the registration and vote status. This is so super important.”
@L’s original 131 tweets received 7,730 engagement retweets.
Less than an hour after the first tweet, @L’s claims started to gain momentum among larger influencers like Lauren Chen, host at hyper-partisan BlazeTV; Michelle Malkin, Charlie Kirk and Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., a far right trump supporter and one of the leaders of the movement claiming alleged voter fraud.
Malkin was a Fox News contributor and in May 2020 joined Newsmax TV. In 2019, Malkin began to publicly support members of the extreme right, including white supremacist Nick Fuentes. In November 2019, she was dropped by the conservative organization Young America’s Foundation (YAF), citing her support for individuals associated with anti-Semitism and white nationalism.