MAGA's Election Interference Flip
Trump is weaponizing foreign threats after gutting the infrastructure that fought them.
Have you heard? MAGA is making election interference great again.
After four years of filing lawsuits, threatening, harassing, deposing, and otherwise vilifying disinformation researchers for having the temerity to study, speak about, and try to undermine information threats to democracy—and after spending 2025 dismantling the government infrastructure that detected and responded to such threats—President Trump and his allies are suddenly raising the banner of “foreign election interference” to attempt to justify their unlawful actions at home and abroad.
They hinted at it during the kidnapping and rendition of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro. They used it to bolster their reasoning for attacking Iran. And they’re conveniently playing the foreign interference card as they float the idea of federalizing American elections.
The Trump Administration and its supporters haven’t had a change of heart. They aren’t suddenly concerned about election interference. They’re searching for cover, and this real national security threat provides it.
The sanctity and security of our elections used to be an issue that motivated Republicans and Democrats alike to act. By couching Trump’s foreign adventurism and domestic despotism in the language of election interference, the administration can diffuse opposition, labeling those who oppose Trump’s illegal acts as hypocritical or weak; justify extreme actions it might take in the 2026 or 2028 elections; and normalize the use of force to respond to threats foreign or domestic, real, imagined, or somewhere in between.
MAGA Cynically Twists the Reality of Election Interference
One of the characteristics of successful disinformation campaigns most misunderstood by the public is that disinformation is rarely completely false; the best disinformation is grounded in a kernel of truth. Hot button issues that generate a lot of disagreement or strong feelings are particularly fertile ground for disinformation. Our adversaries—along with domestic actors spreading disinformation for power and profit—have long weaponized topics like immigration, race relations, and the coronavirus pandemic in their influence campaigns.
The Trump administration has applied the “kernel of truth” tenet to its cynical reclamation of election interference to justify its autocratic actions throughout 2026. Some of its claims about foreign election interference are true, but deploying them after literally dismantling the nonpartisan infrastructure that was built to address them beggars belief.
Venezuelan Interference: False
After the Trump Administration’s kidnapping of Venezuelan dictator Nicolas Maduro in early January, MAGA influencers and a (now former) DOJ official resurfaced old, long-disproven conspiracy theories about alleged Venezuelan attempts to rig the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden.
Trump figures like Rudy Giuliani and lawyer Sidney Powell falsely claimed that voting machine vendors Dominion and Smartmatic were secretly Venezuelan companies that were founded to rig elections for the country’s former leader, Hugo Chávez.
Since then, conspiracy theorists have claimed that the companies somehow disguised themselves as American vendors and used secret programming to flip votes in the 2020 election from Trump to former President Joe Biden.
The pair both settled their lawsuits with Dominion — and Powell even admitted in a filing in federal court that “no reasonable person would conclude that [her] statements were truly statements of fact.” Litigation is ongoing in Smartmatic’s defamation lawsuits against both Giuliani and Powell. (Democracy Docket)
Further, the U.S. intelligence community’s 2020 election assessment notes:
The Venezuelan regime of Nicolas Maduro had an adversarial relationship with the Trump administration and we assess that Maduro had the intent, though probably not the capability, to try to influence public opinion in the US against the former President. We have no information suggesting that the current or former Venezuelan regimes were involved in attempts to compromise US election infrastructure.
Of course, the MAGA crowd believes the intelligence community is full of deep state cretins, so they likely won’t be swayed by this assessment. Given that the President himself raised broader election infrastructure conspiracy theories with a tie-in to Venezuela, and that the Trump Administration has a history of pressuring foreign leaders to make politically-motivated accusations (remember the first Trump impeachment?) and no longer seems concerned with perjury, the odds that we see this false narrative rear its head—and resonate with the MAGA movement—in Maduro’s trial are strong.
Iranian Interference: True, But Lacking Nuance
Nearly four hours before Trump announced the United States had bombed Iran at 2:36AM ET on February 28, conservative slime outlet “Just The News,” owned by John Solomon (who famously parted ways with The Hill after his conflicts of interest and distortions about Hunter Biden’s work in Ukraine caused the outlet to publish a scathing’ review of his work) posted a piece situating the looming armed conflict as a natural progression from Iran’s attempts to interfere in American elections. The President posted a link to the story to Truth Social an hour before he announced the action.
Google notified me about the article when I woke up on Saturday morning, because, inexplicably, I was mentioned in it. The author alleged that I and others had “tried to undercut” the assessment that Iran had interfered in the 2020 election against Trump. I did no such thing. I simply attempted to present a nuanced picture of the multitude of informational threats the United States faced in 2020: Iran was interfering, but did not have the resources or the expertise to carry out the level of operation that Russia was known to have engaged in. At the time, I felt that threats from Iran were being emphasized while threats from Russia were being minimized because of the president’s own desire to bury news related to Russia. Over and over in my writing and media commentary, I underlined that the Iranian campaign harmed Trump; I also noted that disinformation, no matter the source, ought to concern all of us, no matter our political affiliation, because its “ultimate victim is democracy.” That’s hardly undercutting an intelligence assessment.
Before Just the News posts a follow up piece alleging I refuse to acknowledge Iranian interference, I’ll write it plainly so even they can understand: Iran has attempted to interfere in multiple U.S. elections:
The 2020 Election Threats report from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence assessed that “Iran carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut former President Trump’s reelection prospects—though without directly promoting his rivals—undermine public confidence in the electoral process and US institutions, and sow division and exacerbate societal tensions in the US. This included a now-well known operation in which Iranian actors masqueraded as the Proud Boys and used public voter rolls to threaten Democrats in several states. As Kate Starbird explains, some of the very same civil society and academic researchers who have been lambasted for the past four years were critical to attribution and public notification about that campaign:
“Researchers, including a team at the Stanford Internet Observatory, quickly noted inconsistencies in some of the metadata of the email and the video. The SIO team shared the results of their analysis directly with government agencies and through a public blog. Around that same time, the U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) and FBI formally attributed the emails and video to an Iranian advanced persistent threat (APT) actor.”In 2022, the ODNI report found that “Iran’s influence activities reflected its intent to exploit perceived social divisions and undermine confidence in US democratic institutions” during the midterms.
Yes, Iran attempted to interfere in our elections, but bombing a girls’ elementary school and sacrificing American servicemembers’ lives is not an appropriate response.
Chinese Interference in 2020 Election: False
Most worryingly, The Washington Post reported earlier this week that:
Pro-Trump activists who say they are in coordination with the White House are circulating a 17-page draft executive order that claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting. (Gift link.)
The problem with this allegation, of course, is that the intelligence community’s 2020 assessment says that it’s false. According to the IC, China thought about interfering in the 2020 presidential contest but elected not to, because it “did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk blowback if caught. Beijing probably believed that its traditional influence tools, primarily targeted economic measures and lobbying key individuals and interest groups, would be sufficient to achieve its goal of shaping US policy regardless of who won the election.”
According to the Post’s reporting, the President would use these flimsy claims of Chinese interference to introduce a number of changes to elections that would make it more difficult to vote:
The measures listed in the 2025 draft of the proposed executive order include requiring hand-marked and hand-counted paper ballots, requiring voters to register anew for the 2026 midterms with proof of citizenship, and restricting mail ballots to limited circumstances. The draft also proposes authorizing the Justice Department, U.S. Citizen and Immigration Services, the Social Security Administration and the Postal Service to have a role in identifying ineligible voters.
The context of such a report—in which Trump advisor Steve Bannon has suggested sending ICE officials to the polls and Trump is taking violent action against election interference abroad—is incredibly chilling. It’s up to Secretaries of State, who administer elections, to actively resist these unlawful and unfounded attempts to assume federal control over their states’ rights. We, the American people, should make sure they know we’ve got their backs.
Trump Dismantled Our Counter-Interference Infrastructure
In his effort to “defend free speech,” President Trump has dismantled the government infrastructure that would have addressed the very threats his administration has recently claimed to be concerned about. Since the beginning of Trump’s second term:
The Global Engagement Center, the State Department’s counter-foreign-influence arm, was shut down after a bad faith campaign labeled its work to expose foreign state-backed propaganda as censorship. The GEC’s efforts included intelligence gathering, public attribution and communication, and counter-programming.
Tulsi Gabbard dismantled the Foreign Malign Influence Center, a Congressionally-mandated center within ODNI that was “dedicated to tracking and analyzing State-sponsored efforts to interfere in U.S. institutions, elections, and society.” The center was established in a bipartisan effort and continued to receive bipartisan support as recently as 2024.
On her first day in office, Attorney General Pam Bondi shuttered the FBI’s Foreign Influence Task Force, which former FBI Director Chris Wray “described...as an effort to leverage the bureau’s collective expertise and resources in counterintelligence, cybersecurity and counterterrorism to investigate, call out and disrupt foreign-led efforts to interfere in American elections.”
The Department of Homeland Security’s Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency has pulled back from election disinformation work and lost a third of its workforce, with employees working on disinformation put on administrative leave or laid off. Former CISA Director and Trump appointee Chris Krebs, who was fired by tweet after declaring the 2020 election the most secure in our nation’s history, lost his security clearance because, according to the White House, he “falsely and baselessly denied that the 2020 election was rigged and stolen, including by inappropriately and categorically dismissing widespread election malfeasance and serious vulnerabilities with voting machines.”
Pete Hegseth ordered U.S. Cyber Command “to stand down from all planning against Russia, including offensive digital actions.”
In addition to efforts to track and respond to foreign election interference, the Trump administration also halted softer approaches to the problem, axing USAID, which supported millions of dollars in disinformation research, media, resilience-building programming around the world, and gutting Voice of America and Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty, which provided authoritative news to people all over the world.
I know there are still patriotic, experienced civil servants quietly trying to keep this work alive across the Federal Government, but as in the first Trump Administration, when the Commander-in-Chief is either ignoring a threat because it is politically inconvenient or cynically championing it to achieve political ends, the American people don’t benefit. Our adversaries do. Without coordination inside government (which is, ironically, what I was hired to do at DHS) and clear, transparent communication to allies, adversaries, and the public, the quiet efforts to track and respond to foreign interference that may still exist are unfortunately doomed.
Why, and what now?
The Trump Administration’s sudden about-face on election interference is pure chicanery, weaponizing a serious national security threat for political purposes.
It justifies acts of retribution against enemies like myself, Chris Krebs, and the many fired civil servants who worked on these issues. We weren’t to be trusted; according to Trump world, we “missed” or “discounted” the signs of election interference the administration is now so bravely uncovering. But bringing us up as folk villains is an important tell; pro-MAGA media is making emotional arguments to their base in order to justify its illegal actions at home and abroad.
MAGA’s embrace of election interference has chilling implications for upcoming elections, normalizing a “whatever it takes” approach that could disenfranchise voters. It might be used to justify changes that would allow the White House to take control over federal elections, introducing rules that make it more difficult to vote. It could also be used as a pretext to send ICE or other armed units to monitor the polls, discouraging Black and brown folks from casting a ballot.
There’s never been a more important time for all of us to get involved with election administration and observation. Check if your local election board is recruiting pollworkers, or if a local office of Common Cause, the League of Women Voters, the Ford-Carter Election Observation Network, or your local political party are running election observer training and missions. These operations document the electoral process, monitor for irregularities, and ensure everyone has the ability to vote.
I hope none of these predictions come to pass, but as the months ahead of the 2026 midterms tick by, I’ll be in your inbox, helping you navigate this toxic information environment. Thanks for reading. 🧭