Trump spreads election conspiracy theories

Donald Trump visited the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier on Veterans Day.

Chris Kleponis / EPA

US President Donald Trump has hardly been seen in public since his electoral defeat. That doesn’t stop him from spreading conspiracy theories about alleged mass election fraud via Twitter.

Trump can rely on a network of media organizations that evidently trumpet anything that questions the election and its unfiltered outcome in the world.

“News organization” as a cabinet of horror

If you want to go out and experience the horror, check out the GNews site, the “news portal” of Guo Wengui, the new sponsor of former Trump strategic adviser Steve Bannon. There you learn not only that Trump actually won the election, but also that America’s foreign intelligence service, the CIA, developed computer programs that simulated the elections, and has done so since 2012. So they would be a product of the election. Obama administration, which should raise the question of why they weren’t used in 2016 to steal Trump’s victory. But that would undermine the conspiracy theory.

The “disclosure” of these secret programs called “Hammer” and “Scorecard” goes back to a retired Air Force general and former intelligence programmer. Systems should be able to “flip” votes when they are transmitted from constituencies to the central electoral authority of the Member State. So you could turn votes for Trump into votes for Democratic candidate Joe Biden – exactly what Trump claims was happening on a large scale in Pennsylvania.

The problem is that the results of the vote count are made public on paper in the constituencies before being transmitted to the constituent state’s electoral authority and can be viewed by all parties. If there were differences from the figures that the Member State then publishes, they would also be visible to everyone.

In order to stop the oxygen supply to this and many other fraud allegations, authorities at all levels of government together with the National Agency for the Security of Information and Infrastructure Facilities in the United States (Cisa), founded in 2018 , released a statement Thursday in a public statement that the 2020 election was the safest in U.S. history. They are aware that unfounded accusations and disinformation are circulating, the statement continues. But they had great faith in the security and integrity of the elections and asked the population to do the same. If you have any questions, please contact the members of the electoral authorities.

On the same day, the White House fired two employees of the Ministry of Homeland Security, including a senior CISA adviser. Their boss, Christopher Krebs, told employees he too expected a layoff soon. He had already warned before the election that the worst in terms of disinformation was yet to come and could only really become visible after the election.

Contradiction will not be tolerated

The layoffs fit into a mentality that has accelerated since Trump’s election defeat. The most notable victim was Defense Secretary Mark Esper, who dared to publicly contradict the president over the summer. It appears that the White House has launched another wave of purges to eliminate unfair forces from their ranks.

In this context, some commentators outline dark scenarios of a president with authoritarian instincts who also flirts with undemocratic ideas in order to maintain his power. Another explanation, also corresponding to the character of Trump, would be pure revenge. Nothing is more conducive to an abrupt end to a career in the Trump administration than suspicion or even evidence of non-compliance.