At the time, it was the most infamous election press conference in American history. A couple of weeks after Donald Trump lost his 2020 re-election bid, his hapless lawyers held a bewildering event at the Republican National Committee headquarters, where they tried to describe a secret plot that only they were aware of.
The legal team pitched a hysterical tale involving George Soros, “communist money,” the Clinton Foundation, antifa, Cuba and possibly China. Rudy Giuliani and his colleagues also pointed the finger at Venezuela and its former president, Hugo Chávez, who’d died seven years earlier.
All of this came to mind anew watching the president’s lengthy White House press conference on Tuesday, when he fielded a related question.
Now that Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro is in U.S. custody, someone asked, “has any more information emerged that you could share with us regarding Venezuelan election software and Venezuelan ties to tampering with the 2020 election?”
Trump replied that members of his team had “learned some things” related to the conspiracy theory, though he didn’t elaborate.
Since White House press conferences don’t come with decoder rings, it’s likely that many viewers had no idea what this exchange was about. Let’s take a moment to clarify.
As my MS NOW colleague Brandy Zadrozny recently explained, one of the recurring storylines among far-right conspiracy theorists is that Venezuela somehow played a role in dictating the outcome of the U.S. election in 2020 by controlling voting machines.
It’s all nonsense, of course, but almost immediately after U.S. bombs started dropping on Venezuela and Maduro was taken into custody, conspiratorial pillow executive Mike Lindell celebrated, telling The Atlantic, “I’m hoping now that Maduro will actually come clean and tell us everything about the machines and how they steal the elections.”
Former White House national security adviser Michael Flynn and Infowars propagandist Alex Jones have pushed similar lines. And after conservative media personality Sean Davis wrote on social media that “it’s gonna be wild when Maduro tries to plead to lesser charges by proffering evidence that the 2020 election was stolen,” Ed Martin, Trump’s “weaponization” czar at the Justice Department, responded with a tweet of his own that consisted entirely of an exclamation point.
Given a chance to reject all of this nonsense, the president did the opposite, adding fresh fuel to a ridiculous fire that should have petered out years ago.
