In the days following Donald Trump’s clear win, conspiracy theories about how votes were tampered with or how the election was stolen from Kamala Harris have spread on the left, with viral tweets, TikTok videos, and posts on Threads making a chaotic and spotty case alleging a fishy result.

“I’m beginning to believe our election was massively hacked,” wrote former journalist and documented conspiracy theorist Wayne Madsen on Threads, neatly pouring every flavor of suspicion into one overfilled bottle. “Think Elon Musk, StarLink, Peter Thiel, Bannon, Flynn and Putin. 20 million Democratic votes don’t disappear on their own.”

Such post-election delusions aren’t particularly surprising—as political science professors Joe Uscinski and Joseph Parent have written, indelicately but accurately, conspiracy theories are for “losers,” and tend to resonate when groups are “suffering from loss, weakness, or disunity.” But what’s far stranger is that conspiracy theories about election tampering are somehow, still, also happening among the winners on the right. 

On the left, Harris voters attempting to make sense of their loss have turned to baseless fears that Trump-backing billionaire Elon Musk somehow tampered with the vote through Starlink. While that satellite internet company is wholly owned by his company SpaceX, it is not, contrary to many of these claims, used by any state to tabulate votes. There’s also the separate claim that 20 million votes are “missing” when compared to the last presidential election. That also isn’t true: results are still being tabulated, and the overall number of votes is on track to be extremely close to 2020’s total. On a broader level, Jen Easterly, the director of the federal Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, reports it has “no evidence of any malicious activity that had a material impact on the security or integrity of our election infrastructure.”

The Meta-owned social media site Threads has been particularly full of left-and-liberal election denialism. As journalist Taylor Lorenz explains, the situation illustrates “how Meta’s efforts to downrank and minimize journalistic content on the app have helped to create a vacuum in which misinformation thrives unchecked and users are unable to find reliable, accurately reported news.” It’s also a clear sign that some social media users are finding that dabbling in election conspiracy theories earns much-craved attention and engagement, with some posts alleging a Starlink plot racking up thousands of views.

There were early signs America was heading toward a post-election season characterized by broad suspicions of fraud: in an October 3 Marist poll, 58 percent of respondents said they were either “concerned” or “very concerned” that voter fraud might occur this year. Of course, fears of voter fraud have haunted American elections for almost as long as we’ve been a country, and have been harnessed by politicians and activists since the early 19th century to motivate their own base to vote—and to change the rules to try to keep some voters, especially immigrants and the poor, from the polls. 

In the run up to last week’s vote, Trump and his allies regularly pushed such fears, raising the false specter of American voters being overwhelmed at the polls by illegal non-citizen voters. That came on top of years of similar claims, and against the backdrop of Trump’s false contention he won the 2020 election. But while the firehose of voter fraud accusations slowed down dramatically after Trump’s win last week, it didn’t stop entirely.

In the very early morning of November 6, not long after polls closed, Mike Adams, who runs the conspiracy site Natural News, wrote that “Dems still have a chance to cheat their way to ‘victory’ in the hours ahead, and trucks of ballots are now seen unloading tens of thousands of ballots in Philadelphia.” While multiple conspiracy peddlers reported on a supposed convoy of trucks bringing fraudulent ballots to Pennsylvania, most dropped the claim after Trump’s win in the state was secured.

A similar pattern played out in Arizona, where TruthSocial and right-wing Twitter users claimed early on that voter fraud was occurring against Donald Trump. The day after the election, far-right news site Real America’s Voice devoted a lengthy segment to “apparent voter fraud” in Arizona. “This is such a shady state,” commentator Ben Bergquam proclaimed, claiming that “they are allowing people to vote who they know are not registered voters. They’re allowing fraudulent votes.”

But when Trump’s victory in the state became clear on November 11, prominent Trump fans and conspiratorial news sites maintained that fraud had somehow taken place in down-ballot races, even if it had not in deciding the presidency. After Democrat Ruben Gallego triumphed over ultra-conservative Kari Lake in Arizona’s Senate race, Rogan O’Handley, a conservative commentator who uses the handle DC Draino on Twitter, claimed without evidence (as Lake has) that Gallego was “cartel-linked,” and suggested that had something to do with his win: “I’ll give you a hint. It’s fraud.”

Twitter’s “Election Integrity Community” also focused its muddled attention on Arizona, as well as on the Wisconsin Senate race. In an otherwise triumphal tweet the night after the election, Musk himself conspiratorially wrote that the “few states that didn’t go red are mostly ones without voter ID requirements. Must be a coincidence,” punctuated with an eye-roll emoji. His America PAC tweeted a similar claim earlier in the day; these claims ignore that 36 states already request or require some form of voter ID. Many of the ones that don’t are ideologically Democratic-leaning states where Harris was heavily favored to win.

In what seems to be an emerging narrative on the far-right, Infowars conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones claimed that Democrats tried to carry out election fraud on behalf of Harris and simply failed. “I think the face of the police and the poll watchers and the lawyers, they went, ‘We just can’t do this anymore, this is too obvious,’” he declared. “And then boom, we saw Trump win. That’s not even conjecture. That’s what happened.” 

But true to form, Jones also couldn’t resist pointing to supposed fraud somewhere, darkly claiming that “glitches” flipping seats from Republican to Democrat had been “exposed” by Lara Trump and Susie Wiles, Trump’s incoming chief of staff. That narrative echoed one pushed by Gateway Pundit, which speciously seized on a report that the apparent winners of some county-level races in Michigan could change as votes continue to be tabulated, a process known colloquially as “counting votes.”   

Even Donald Trump himself had to find ways to reconcile an uncomplicated victory with his incessant advance warnings of fraud. He turned to newly relevant slogan, posting a red-tinted photo of a crowd of his supporters, overlaid with the words “TOO BIG TO RIG.”

Donald Trump’s rhetoric during his 2024 campaign has been the darkest in modern memory. He has emphasized grievance and demagoguery ever since he first ran for president, most infamously with his build-up to the January 6 insurrection. But in recent months he has gone to new extremes. In numerous speeches and media appearances, he has peddled false conspiracy theories about the two assassination attempts against him and stoked fear and anger nonstop about an alleged “invasion” of murderous migrants, who he claims are “poisoning the blood of” America and “conquering” cities and towns nationwide.

Throughout the election homestretch, Trump has woven these virulent strands into his core message about a supposed grand conspiracy by Democrats to steal the White House from him. Trump and multiple top surrogates have spent months asserting that his political opponents “even tried to kill him” as part of this plot—a canard Trump further amplified when he returned for a second rally at the site in Butler, Pennsylvania, where a gunman opened fire in mid-July.

During a speech in Atlanta, Trump reiterated lies about Democrats conspiring to use undocumented migrants to transform America. “It’s so sinister,” he said, “but they want to sign these people up to vote, and if they do that, this country is destroyed. We’d become a dumping ground for the entire world.” Trump has drawn on such “Great Replacement” themes—an extremist ideology embraced by multiple mass shooters—ever since he was in the White House. And Trump’s biggest financial backer, Elon Musk, is now also advancing this theme, speaking at Trump rallies and posting with massive reach on his social media platform, X.

Most news media rarely, if ever, frame Trump’s rhetoric for what it is: methodical, sustained incitement. Proving a direct connection between Trump’s incendiary messaging and acts of violence can be all but impossible—a gap of plausible deniability that is central to the method of stochastic terrorism, as it’s known to national security experts. Nonetheless there is a long history of Trump’s rhetoric correlating strongly with subsequent menace and violence: a surge in threats targeting journalists as “the enemy of the people,” a Trump supporter attacking an FBI field office after Trump raged against the raid on Mar-a-Lago, threats to kill FBI agents over a “stolen election” and the Hunter Biden case.

The intensifying demagoguery from Trump this election season has caused high concern among threat assessment and law enforcement experts, as I’ve been reporting since June. Fortunately, their worst fears about the kind of catastrophic violence it might provoke have yet to be realized. But according to two senior federal law enforcement sources I spoke with in recent weeks, Trump’s extremism has been accompanied by a rise in violent threats reflecting his messaging.

According to these sources, multiple cases of threats have involved individuals citing or parroting Trump’s ongoing claims about violent migrants invading and taking over the country. Trump’s continual focus on that alleged menace has produced a noticeable hardening effect, one source told me: “We see that the longer it’s talked about, the more it becomes perceived as fact.” Other cases have included talk of “payback or revenge” against Trump’s political adversaries for the assassination attempts, including threats focused on elected officials.

Trump’s hyperbole at recent rallies has included macabre descriptions of alleged rape and murder by migrants, such as telling his supporters, “they’ll cut your throat.” After his rally last Saturday in Latrobe, Pennsylvania, most media coverage focused on his lewd comments about golf legend Arnold Palmer’s genitals, but less noted was that Trump also conjured a specter of war against migrants: “We will not be invaded, we will not be occupied, we will not be conquered. That’s what they’re doing. This is an invasion into our country of a foreign military.”

He has continued to blame Vice President Kamala Harris for this non-reality: “She’s letting vicious gangs take over whole communities,” he inveighed at a rally on Monday in Greenville, North Carolina. “She’s bussing and flying them in by the millions.”

A threat assessment expert who consults for federal law enforcement told me that the fear and contempt generated by such rhetoric is potent, and can be interpreted by some people as permission to commit violence. “It’s really poisonous, and it’s giving justification to people who are on the edge to take extreme actions.”

In September, the town of Springfield, Ohio, endured waves of paralyzing bomb threats and other harassment after Trump and his running mate, JD Vance, spread lies about Haitian immigrants supposedly stealing and eating neighbors’ pets. Risk for violence escalated in the southeastern US when Trump and his allies seized on the aftermath of Hurricane Helene, falsely accusing FEMA and the Biden administration of abandoning victims. These repeated lies were debunked by state and local leaders, including Republicans, but that didn’t stop Trump. “They spent their money on illegal migrants,” he declared again at Monday’s rally in Greenville. “They didn’t have any money left for North Carolina.”

Trump has continued to tell this lie in his stump speech—even after a Trump supporter armed with multiple guns was arrested in western North Carolina in mid-October for allegedly threatening to harm FEMA workers. That and other armed threats disrupted the agency’s efforts to help hurricane victims.  

Risk for violence around Election Day remains a high concern and a focus for law enforcement, the sources confirmed to me. As one longtime election official in Georgia explained this week to the Wall Street Journal: “People have had four years of just marinating in all sorts of different conspiracy theories, and we worry they’ll come in looking for a problem. Then you got, ‘Hey everyone come down to the polling place,’ and mobs showing up, maybe armed, and it can really snowball very quickly.” 

The temperature also has been rising with adversarial partisan crowds, as seen in Pennsylvania on Sunday in the vicinity of a McDonald’s where Trump posed briefly as a fry cook. Concern will extend well beyond Election Day, through a period of uncertainty about voting results that is likely to follow—and that undoubtedly will be further weaponized by Trump and his allies using baseless claims of fraud, sand-in-the-gears litigation, and beyond.

National security and threat assessment experts told me after the January 6 insurrection that quashing the violent extremism unleashed by Trump requires a fundamental change in what political leaders treat as acceptable rhetoric. But through the years of Trump’s continuing grip on the Republican Party, that standard has trended in the wrong direction, with many Republican politicians excusing or even joining in on Trump’s tactics.

With Election Day fast approaching, no Republican member of Congress or high-profile figure in the party is speaking out forcefully against Trump’s dark rhetoric. House Speaker Mike Johnson and others stick to misdirection or feigned ignorance, if they address the matter at all. As one threat assessment source told me: “Silence is its own form of participation.”

In 2020, as for so many people, things shifted for Jessica Reed Kraus. A Southern California–based lifestyle blogger who got her start writing about motherhood, Kraus felt dubious about Covid safety measures and vaccines, and disaffected from mainstream liberal politics.

With her photogenic world upended, she wanted to talk about natural immunity and her objection to “vax cards,” she later wrote, and how they would “eliminate portions of society from general aspects of life.” When she did, she wrote that she was branded “an anti-vax Qanon nutjob which made me overly defensive.” 

The pandemic ushered in a new focus, a transition from posts about decorating her gorgeous Southern California home—once featured on Martha Stewart’s Instagram—and her Etsy business helping others make similarly tasteful purchases; the most popular items were canvas teepees for children. Instead, she grew both increasingly conspiratorial and, at the same time, more invested in carving out a niche where celebrity gossip met hard news. It “proved,” she has written on Instagram, “an accidental hit.” 

Today, Kraus has a million followers on Instagram, and her Substack, House Inhabit, is top-ranked in the platform’s culture category, with some 380,000 subscribers, many of whom pay $7 a month for her paywalled posts. (By the Wall Street Journal’s estimate, the site pulls in more than $1 million annually.) Over the the last year, she’s given more attention to a new set of boldface names, becoming a fixture in both the Donald Trump and Robert F. Kennedy Jr. universes, providing unstinting positive coverage of both men that she depicts as free from mainstream media bias.

During his now-suspended campaign and into his current Trump-surrogate phase, Kraus has provided a glossy view of Kennedy, depicting him as a handsome, breezy scion of his famous family. “My campaign coverage has provided a rare source of balanced insight,” she writes, “presenting an authentic interpretation of Kennedy and his messaging amid a storm of recycled, slanderous articles.” After she accompanied Kennedy, family members, and actress Alicia Silverstone on a hike, she described being allowed to linger in his office while he hurried off to a campaign event in ecstatic terms: “My dreams are manifesting now as reality,” she wrote. In this Polo catalogue vision, she also manages to brush off some of his strangest moments; in response to the revelation he’d once dumped a dead bear cub in Central Park, she noted that someone DMed her that it made them “like him more.”

“Maybe the series of strange scandals is working for him?” she wrote, rather hopefully.

Kraus’ depiction of Trump has been statesmanlike; she’s called him “a showstopper” and depicted him as a mesmerizing speaker whose supporters have been unfairly tarnished by the mainstream media for their abiding and patriotic love for him. Her Substack posts from the Republicans’ convention were as schmaltzy as they were high-flown, depicting a normal political gathering as a battle for the soul of a nation. “With every story and tear shed, it became clear that this was not just another convention,” she wrote. “It was a watershed moment, a fierce reclamation of a vision for America that many felt had been slipping away.”

This intense rhetoric—good versus evil, manful heroes facing off against the abyss of the Deep State—helps Kraus inject drama and glamour. “I kind of love the new challenge of making politics engaging again,” she told a Wall Street Journal interviewer.

But to see Kraus’ career as a tidy narrative—mommy blogger to political quasi-journalist—would elide the notably weird flavor of her politics and beliefs. Despite her protests about being called a “Qanon nutjob,” for years Kraus has been obsessed with Pizzagate-ish ideas about occult rituals among Hollywood celebrities, making claims that Travis Scott’s 2021 Astroworld festival, where 10 people died in a concert stampede, was literally a demonic ritual. She and her occasional Substack co-author, Emilie Hagen, have hosted and platformed the work of New Age conspiracy Instagrammer Jennifer Carmody, who has claimed that celebrities like Elvis were victims of CIA mind control. She’s reposted comments by far-right conspiracist Liz Crokin asserting that “Israel can’t have the truth about Pizzagate coming out.” Whatever the most eyeball-grabbing news of the day—Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, Diddy’s arrest—she’ll spin the event as a forerunner to a promised post that will blow the lid off a sprawling sexual abuse scandal.

Kraus’ oeuvre is a window into a world of exceedingly rich and privileged women enmeshed in conspiracy theories, especially those involving allegations of elite occult sexual abuse. Her celebrity coverage, combined with the aspirational lifestyle she presents, has helped her amass a large, devoted, and heavily female fanbase, who seem to want to emulate her and other wealthy women in her circles. Last summer, I spoke to one Kraus fan, an exceedingly polished and fit mom of teenage children, for hours at a tony Oregon hot spring spa, who struck up a hot tub conversation by asking what I knew about aliens and told me House Inhabit was the only media source she trusted. Kraus appears to be friendly on social media with Lady Victoria Hervey, an English model and socialite (and former girlfriend of Prince Andrew) who now posts Instagram musings about “Hollywood’s dark Satanic cults” and “plandemics,” both posts that Kraus has liked. (Hervey responded to a request for comment by writing, “Let me check with Jessica on this.” She didn’t reply to follow-up messages.)

Throughout Kennedy’s campaign, Kraus took on the role of an observer-participant, leaving it ambiguous about whether she was there as an affiliate of the campaign or on her own. This week, Kraus denied “being paid by a campaign,” as she put it on Instagram, while disclosing that American Values 2024, a PAC promoting Kennedy, had “offered me a hotel room” during the Democratic National Convention and threw her a pizza and wine party while there. Hours later, she said that was incorrect, and that she’d paid for her own hotel but that American Values spent $1,140 on merch from her site: hats reading “Make Speech Free Again” for supporters to wear around the convention.

Kennedy’s political team, which did not respond to a request for comment, has been happy to reward and promote her positive coverage, making her the moderator of a September 12 conversation between Kennedy and Tulsi Gabbard in Arizona. His campaign even auctioned off a Zoom conversation with her during a fundraiser. (It went for $500.) She was also briefly named as the “director of social media” for a fizzled birthday party fundraiser that would have been hosted by another Kennedy-backing super-PAC. Her efforts to get close to the Trump campaign haven’t been as successful, though there have been some inroads: In August, Donald Trump Jr. showed up at a backyard meetup for Kraus’ followers in Jupiter, Florida. “Sitting fireside, in front of a group of strangers, he shared funny stories about his father,” Kraus wrote on Instagram.

After Kennedy suspended his campaign in August and endorsed the former president, she posted a photo to Instagram of the two men sharing a stage. “You know I fought hard for this,” she wrote, adding a weeping emoji and telling her readers the endorsement was “significant and deeply emotional, built of Shakespearean bones.”

Since then, she’s filmed herself backstage at several Trump campaign events, standing next to personalities who have endorsed the former president, like Roseanne Barr. She also shows signs of becoming a more regular feature in Republican circles, especially Kennedy-adjacent ones: she was spotted at a DC book party in May for Gabbard. She also posted a beaming photo of herself backstage at one of Tucker Carlson’s recent live events, wedged into frame with him and conspiracy kingpin Alex Jones. 

Spokesperson Steven Cheung did not respond to emails asking about Kraus’ access or role with Trump’s campaign. And Kraus herself, after initially agreeing to speak but twice canceling by citing lunch dates that ran long, ultimately declined my interview requests. “I sense the angle. And I’m just too busy with everything springing up without warning,” she wrote, adding that she was about to catch a flight to a Trump event. She also declined to respond to emailed questions.  

Kraus was raised in Corona, a midsize town at the intersection of two freeways in Riverside County. As a child, she has written on Instagram, “I adored all the top 90s gossip columnists. I could not think of a more fabulous existence.” She’s said that her father died by suicide when she was 6, and that she experienced a period of “elective mutism” in the aftermath. The Journal piece also noted that she is estranged from her mother.

After becoming pregnant with her first child in 2005 with her then-boyfriend, Mike, Kraus got her start in the public eye with a carefully curated, Goop-esque form of lifestyle blogging and ruminations about motherhood. (The couple later married and now have four boys in all.) Early posts, where she went by the name Mrs. Habit, tend to fall flat; you can feel her boredom with the genre and its limitations leaking through the screen. “I know I’ve had a really tough time keeping up on posts,” she admitted in a 2011 update.

In 2014, while pregnant with her youngest, Kraus launched The Ma Books, a literary-minded blog which billed itself as an “online haven for women with brains and a budget.” It was born, she has written, out of a disgust with overly curated mommy blogs. “They want you to believe they do it all, and much better and more fashionable than you too,” she wrote. But despite any suggestion it might counterprogram the space’s typically too-polished images, visually, it was quite similar: a beautiful and more upscale vision of motherhood than what Kraus saw from other mommy chroniclers on Blogger.

The Ma Books continued until 2019, as Kraus grew her personal Instagram, sharing photos of her husband’s extensive DIY renovations, her family’s travels, and wistful photos of her children playing on the beach, surfing, and getting ready for camp, often laid over with sepia-tinted filters. As an Instagram influencer, she was modestly successful, and the family got plenty of approving write-ups in magazines and lifestyle and design blogs, as Kraus described herself as a “stay at home mom” who did a little writing on the side. While there was some mild and anodyne Democratic-leaning political content—in 2016, Ma Books posted a Hillary Clinton endorsement on Instagram, and created a hashtag for its readers to flaunt the stylish outfits they wore to the polls—what she churned out felt tuned to appeal to the broadest possible spectrum of women online.

All of that changed with Covid, and Kraus’ newly out-loud viewpoints. “My income, at that point, depended on the sellable nature of my ‘brand,’ which was liberal-leaning & sans controversy,” she wrote on Instagram last year, reflecting on that time. “During the lockdown, though, I grew bitter and resentful over my own silent surrender and increasing censorship online. We couldn’t question anything.”

“This is how the pop culture stories started—as a way to house my passion for truth in a volatile online environment, without sacrificing my beliefs,” she wrote. Kraus has said she fell under the spell of 2021’s Maxwell trial, watching obsessively from home until Mike suggested she simply go to New York and see it herself. In her coverage from the courtroom, Kraus developed what seems to be a queasy kind of sympathy for Maxwell—describing her “uncomfortable magnetism” and “electric presence,” as she depicted Jeffrey Epstein’s enabler as taking the fall for more powerful male abusers.

During the 2022 defamation trial between actors Johnny Depp and Amber Heard, New York’s Choire Sicha wrote about how influencers—Kraus first among them—were, to Depp’s benefit, “shaping the general public’s understanding” far more than many mainstream reporters. Kraus, he wrote, became “a trial-obsessed Instagrammer” and “a chief instigator of the anti-Heard story line.” While covering the proceedings, she also became a minor character, reporting that she spoke to Depp by phone in advance of the proceedings, a conversation in which he denounced the failings of the mainstream media. When her Instagram account was suspended during the trial, she intimated a conspiracy: “The whole thing feels very calculated. I feel like I’m siting here with my hands tied, paying a hefty price for seeking truth.” (The account was quickly restored.)

There have only been a few moments that Kraus doesn’t seem proud of. For one, she has deleted her Astroworld claims. While Catherine, the Princess of Wales, was being treated for an undisclosed illness, she claimed to have spoken to “an individual connected to hospital staff.” She deleted that phrase, replacing it with the more ambiguous “an individual connected to recovery.” (She also claimed that the princess had had bowel surgery and was wearing a temporary stoma bag; royal spokespeople have said she had abdominal surgery and chemotherapy for an undisclosed form of cancer.) Other, wilder stories remain on her platforms, like one purporting Amber Heard presided over sex parties with “Satanic themes” and “lesbian orgies.” She wrote that Elon Musk not only attended, but is also the father of Heard’s young daughter. Kraus later wrote on Instagram that Elon Musk and Amber Heard had teamed up to file a potential lawsuit against her. “Completely false,” says Heard attorney Elaine Bredehoft. “I have never even heard that.”

Kraus also made false claims about an actual journalist during Depp and Heard’s trial, saying that NBC reporter Kat Tenbarge was working for Heard’s legal team. “Any idiot would know that is not true,” Tenbarge wrote on Twitter recently, “and I reached out to her and told her it wasn’t, and she blocked me.” 

Kraus is fascinated by legacies, famous people, and power. She’s written at length on Maxwell’s tony upbringing and the royal family, and is clearly more than a little attracted by what the Kennedys represent. A key part of her appeal to readers are claims to have inside sources and tipsters close to the nerve centers of politics and entertainment alike.

But as Kraus continues her particular blend of access journalism and campaign boosterism, some close to Kennedy and Trump describe her as little short of a political social-climber. “Donald has no clue who the fuck she is,” one person familiar with the situation told me. As for Kennedy, the same person added, “She’s saying she’s a friend of Kennedy’s. She’s not. She doesn’t know any of Kennedys’ friends. She’s just been stalking him all over.” Indeed, Kraus told more than one person that she temporarily lost her Kennedy campaign access after an argument of some kind with one of his children. 

On September 13, Kraus published a fawning Q&A with Olivia Nuzzi, which seemed calibrated to showcase her closeness to New York magazine’s star political correspondent. Kraus described how they had developed a “valued friendship,” dubbing her an “inspirational force” and “the last of the real ones.”

But a little more than a week later, shortly after Nuzzi was reported to have exchanged “personal” text messages with Kennedy—later reported to have included intimate photos—Kraus made an abrupt pivot. “As I reflect, my overall take is that I was a pawn,” Kraus wrote in a new post that assailed Nuzzi as an amoral fake and seductress, reflecting on how she was taken by a “phony connection.” Notably, it also quoted Gavin de Becker, Kennedy’s “security expert,” claiming that Kennedy planed to file “civil litigation” as well as make “potential criminal referrals” against Nuzzi. De Becker claimed to Kraus that Kennedy was hounded by Nuzzi sending him nudes, saying, “This had nothing to do with romance. He was being chased by porn.” These Kraus-reported remarks were widely repeated in the mainstream press—without much context about the media figure who relayed them or her relationship with the campaign. 

Nuzzi claimed in court in the process of obtaining a protection order against her ex-fiance, Politico journalist Ryan Lizza, that he shared information about her communications with Kennedy with the news media to hurt her. Nuzzi—who, like many people in journalism, I’ve been casually friendly with for years—declined to comment. Kraus has announced plans to mine 10 months of text messages between herself and Nuzzi to write about Nuzzi’s relationship with Lizza, and make the story available first to paid subscribers.

Whatever Kraus feels about Nuzzi, she seemed furious with Kennedy over his part in the relationship. After the New York Times reported that Kennedy knocked down conversations this summer about becoming Trump’s running mate—Kennedy has said that his wife, actress Cheryl Hines, was uncomfortable with him even endorsing Trump—Kraus complained on Instagram that he was willing to “risk [his] marriage for big boned Olivia Nuzzi” but not for the VP slot “to save America.” She followed up with a series of other cryptic messages, including, “JOHNNY DEPP TRIAL ENERGY RISING AGAIN,” and, more ominously, “I’M DONE BEING NICE.” 

The posts seem to illustrate the dangers of keeping a gossip influencer close enough that she might feel personally wounded by campaign decisions. But any estrangement didn’t seem to last long: In early October, Kraus Instagrammed herself aboard a yacht with Kennedy and a handful of other supporters, including Sopranos actress Drea de Matteo. (“Am I the only one wondering if it’s awkward?” a commenter wrote, seemingly referring to Kraus’ apparent anger over Kennedy and Nuzzi.) Soon after, Kraus jetted to Trump’s marquee rally in Butler, the site of July’s assassination attempt, where she provided rapturous play-by-play coverage from somewhere extremely close to the stage.

What Kraus is doing here—a sometimes queasy blend of journalism and fluffery—is certainly not new. Conspiracy influencers cosplaying as journalists have been a regular feature of the last few election cycles. Men’s rights activist, Pizzagate promoter, and all-purpose alt-right troll Mike Cernovich began pivoting to a form of hyper-partisan journalism during the Trump administration, with posts that suggested sourcing in the White House and on the National Security Council. Jack Posobiec, who could be described using many of the same terms as Cernovich, also got a White House press pass. Far-right figure and Trump-confidant Laura Loomer wields similar tools and affects, traipsing with cameras in tow to migrant camps and promising up inside knowledge.

There’s some overlap between Kraus and this earlier generation. “In addition to riveting insight about dirty secrets and filthy politicians,” Kraus has written of Loomer, “she is funny and fearless in her approach and comes stocked with receipts to back her theories and conspiracies.” The two met for lunch to discuss a conspiracy theory that Taylor Swift has been “activated by the left” and may have “made a deal with George and Alex Soros to regain the rights to her music in exchange for getting fans registered to vote Democrat,” as Kraus wrote. Loomer has not presented any compelling evidence to this effect. 

But campaign season only goes so long, which raises the question of what Kraus will do next. She clearly has ambitions to extend her brand, recently placing an enormous billboard promoting her site on Los Angeles’ Sunset Boulevard. In the event of a second Trump White House, you could see her taking up a perch at Mar-a-Lago. But even if he wins, she could end up on the margins, chasing celebrity gossip and Satanic shadows. 

“She thinks it will go on and on and on,” her detractor, who’s familiar with the Trump world, said dismissively. “No. After the election, it’s over and bloggers like her are invited nowhere.”

Long gone are the innocent days when media outlets claimed the independence and nuance of the politics of Elon Musk. Now, amid myriad X posts spreading far-right propaganda on immigrants, trans people, and, well, just about any other topic, it has become obvious where one of the richest men in the world stands.

This week, there was more proof that Musk has put his money where his mouth has been. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Musk poured tens of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns and conservative groups even before he publicly endorsed Donald Trump in July. Conservatives helped conceal Musk’s contributions through so-called social welfare or “dark money” groups that do not have to disclose their donors and can raise unlimited funds. (Musk did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment.)

One piece of reporting stood out. The newspaper found that the tech billionaire donated more than $50 million in 2022 for campaign advertisements by Citizens for Sanity, a group connected to former Trump aide Stephen Miller and his non-profit America First Legal, which bills itself as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU.” 

Ties to Miller back in 2022 illuminate Musk’s current penchant for posting about immigrants. Musk has increasingly aligned himself with xenophobic anti-migrant plans and trans hysteria championed by Miller within the Trump administration. 

As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, Trump has vowed to conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Miller and others have worked for years to develop a plan—including deploying the National Guard, constructing massive detention camps through executive order, and packing the federal government with their own people. 

In recent months, Musk’s posts have sunken to lies of mass voter fraud to help Trump win. As I reported, the billionaire recently posted a rant about how Democrats are the true threat to democracy by fast-tracking asylum seekers for citizenship so that they can vote in swing states. Simple fact-checking finds that asylum seekers are not being flown to battleground states, are not being given a facilitated citizenship process, and are not being allowed to vote—it is all false. 

As we previously noted, these statements fall within the 2024 iteration of the Republicans’ “Big Lie.” If Trump loses in November, then Democrats stole the election through noncitizen voters. 

Musk has also directly aligned himself with Trump, founding a super PAC called America PAC to get 800,000 people to vote for the former president in key battleground states. According to the Guardian, Trump’s ground operation in swing states are now mostly outsourced to America PAC, and Business Insider said that Musk is now shelling out millions to Republicans in 15 competitive House races. Yesterday, Politico reported that America PAC was teaming up with Turning Point Action, the political advocacy division of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, to fund hundreds of “ballot chasers” in Wisconsin. 

Musk also announced yesterday on X that he would attend Trump’s comeback rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, the location of an assassination attempt against the former president in July. 

So much for claiming to be politically moderate.

Long gone are the innocent days when media outlets claimed the independence and nuance of the politics of Elon Musk. Now, amid myriad X posts spreading far-right propaganda on immigrants, trans people, and, well, just about any other topic, it has become obvious where one of the richest men in the world stands.

This week, there was more proof that Musk has put his money where his mouth has been. According to a report from the Wall Street Journal, Musk poured tens of millions of dollars into Republican campaigns and conservative groups even before he publicly endorsed Donald Trump in July. Conservatives helped conceal Musk’s contributions through so-called social welfare or “dark money” groups that do not have to disclose their donors and can raise unlimited funds. (Musk did not respond to the Journal’s request for comment.)

One piece of reporting stood out. The newspaper found that the tech billionaire donated more than $50 million in 2022 for campaign advertisements by Citizens for Sanity, a group connected to former Trump aide Stephen Miller and his non-profit America First Legal, which bills itself as “the long-awaited answer to the ACLU.” 

Ties to Miller back in 2022 illuminate Musk’s current penchant for posting about immigrants. Musk has increasingly aligned himself with xenophobic anti-migrant plans and trans hysteria championed by Miller within the Trump administration. 

As my colleague Isabela Dias wrote, Trump has vowed to conduct “the largest domestic deportation operation in American history.” Miller and others have worked for years to develop a plan—including deploying the National Guard, constructing massive detention camps through executive order, and packing the federal government with their own people. 

In recent months, Musk’s posts have sunken to lies of mass voter fraud to help Trump win. As I reported, the billionaire recently posted a rant about how Democrats are the true threat to democracy by fast-tracking asylum seekers for citizenship so that they can vote in swing states. Simple fact-checking finds that asylum seekers are not being flown to battleground states, are not being given a facilitated citizenship process, and are not being allowed to vote—it is all false. 

As we previously noted, these statements fall within the 2024 iteration of the Republicans’ “Big Lie.” If Trump loses in November, then Democrats stole the election through noncitizen voters. 

Musk has also directly aligned himself with Trump, founding a super PAC called America PAC to get 800,000 people to vote for the former president in key battleground states. According to the Guardian, Trump’s ground operation in swing states are now mostly outsourced to America PAC, and Business Insider said that Musk is now shelling out millions to Republicans in 15 competitive House races. Yesterday, Politico reported that America PAC was teaming up with Turning Point Action, the political advocacy division of Charlie Kirk’s Turning Point USA, to fund hundreds of “ballot chasers” in Wisconsin. 

Musk also announced yesterday on X that he would attend Trump’s comeback rally on Saturday in Butler, Pennsylvania, the location of an assassination attempt against the former president in July. 

So much for claiming to be politically moderate.

There has been a lot of research on the types of people who believe conspiracy theories, and their reasons for doing so. But there’s a wrinkle: My colleagues and I have found that there are a number of people sharing conspiracies online who don’t believe their own content.

They are opportunists. These people share conspiracy theories to promote conflict, cause chaos, recruit and radicalize potential followers, make money, harass, or even just to get attention.

There are several types of this sort of conspiracy-spreader trying to influence you.

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On Sunday, Elon Musk posted a lengthy diatribe about Democrats being the real “threat to democracy.”

In his tweet, Musk claimed that Democrats are flying “asylum seekers” to swing states (this is not happening), fast-tracking them for citizenship (asylum seekers are not fast-tracked), and ensuring said noncitizens can vote (noncitizens cannot vote in federal or state elections). (In the tweet, Musk also lists Ohio as an example of a swing state; it is not.)

In short: Almost every claim in Musk’s rant is factually incorrect.

As we previously stated, Republicans’ “Big Lie” this time has been that Democrats are stealing the election by pushing noncitizens to the ballot box. Trump backed the claim in the presidential debate earlier this month when asked about whether he acknowledges that he lost in 2020. “A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” the former president said. “And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.” 

But, as my colleague Isabela Dias reported, this is not accurate. There are not masses of noncitizens registered to vote. In fact, as she wrote, “a study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2016 election, election officials in 42 jurisdictions overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million votes only referred about 30 cases of ‘suspected noncitizen voting’ for investigation or prosecution—or 0.0001 percent of votes.”

Musk’s logic, though, goes beyond the idea of noncitizens voting. He claims 1 in 20 “illegals” will become citizens per year, resulting in two million new legal voters for Democrats in four years. “America then becomes a one-party state and Democracy is over,” the billionaire wrote. “The only ‘elections’ will be the Democratic Party primaries.”

But this is far from the truth. Last year, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, only 29,000 asylees became naturalized citizens. They all entered the US before Joe Biden’s presidency and were engaged in the five-year process of demonstrating legal permanent residence to apply for citizenship. 

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) also weighed in, replying to Musk’s post, with another theory. “It’s a two prong strategy,” he explained. “When they bring illegals to blue states, the blue states get extra electoral votes in the presidential election and extra congressional districts, even though the illegals can’t vote. This is because we count them in the census and for apportionment.”

As our reporter Ari Berman wrote in 2020, this has been a long-term complaint from the right. Political representation in the 14th Amendment includes “all persons”—not only those eligible to vote. And elected officials, in turn, represent the total population, including those who cannot vote (kids, for example). Republicans want to exclude noncitizens from the census and change the paradigm to reinforce Republican voting power. 

Massie’s communications director, John Kennedy, did not respond to a request for comment. 

Musk has been driving his claims of noncitizens voting for months. The Washington Post reported earlier in September that the false claims had election officials worried. Many told the newspaper that the posts coincided with a rise in requests to toss voter rolls and made them fearful over the possibility of violent threats in the lead-up to November. 

The owner of X also targeted a story from the Los Angeles Times that found that immigration authorities were approving citizenship applications “at the fastest speed in years.” The Times highlighted that right-wing figures were making “baseless claims” and included a statement from Naree Ketudat, a spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security. 

She said that the agency has processed naturalization petitions within a six-month period for decades and that the department “does not take actions based on electoral politics or upcoming elections. Period.” 

So, all of it was wrong. But Musk has not let facts get in the way of posting through it.

On Sunday, Elon Musk posted a lengthy diatribe about Democrats being the real “threat to democracy.”

In his tweet, Musk claimed that Democrats are flying “asylum seekers” to swing states (this is not happening), fast-tracking them for citizenship (asylum seekers are not fast-tracked), and ensuring said noncitizens can vote (noncitizens cannot vote). (In the tweet, Musk also lists Ohio as an example of a swing state; it is not.)

In short: Almost every claim in Musk’s rant is factually incorrect.

As we previously stated, Republicans’ “Big Lie” this time has been that Democrats are stealing the election by pushing noncitizens to the ballot box. Trump backed the claim in the presidential debate earlier this month when asked about whether he acknowledges that he lost in 2020. “A lot of these illegal immigrants coming in, they’re trying to get them to vote,” the former president said. “And that’s why they’re allowing them to come into our country.” 

But, as my colleague Isabela Dias reported, this is not accurate. There are not masses of noncitizens registered to vote. In fact, as she wrote, “a study by the Brennan Center for Justice found that in the 2016 election, election officials in 42 jurisdictions overseeing the tabulation of 23.5 million votes only referred about 30 cases of ‘suspected noncitizen voting’ for investigation or prosecution—or 0.0001 percent of votes.”

Musk’s logic, though, goes beyond the idea of noncitizens voting. He claims 1 in 20 “illegals” will become citizens per year, resulting in two million new legal voters for Democrats in four years. “America then becomes a one-party state and Democracy is over,” the billionaire wrote. “The only ‘elections’ will be the Democratic Party primaries.”

But this is far from the truth. Last year, according to US Citizenship and Immigration Services, only 29,000 asylees became naturalized citizens. They all entered the US before Joe Biden’s presidency and were engaged in the five-year process of demonstrating legal permanent residence to apply for citizenship. 

Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) also weighed in, replying to Musk’s post, with another theory. “It’s a two prong strategy,” he explained. “When they bring illegals to blue states, the blue states get extra electoral votes in the presidential election and extra congressional districts, even though the illegals can’t vote. This is because we count them in the census and for apportionment.”

As our reporter Ari Berman wrote in 2020, this has been a long-term complaint from the right. Political representation in the 14th Amendment includes “all persons”—not only those eligible to vote. And elected officials, in turn, represent the total population, including those who cannot vote (kids, for example). Republicans want to exclude noncitizens from the census and change the paradigm to reinforce Republican voting power. 

Massie’s communications director, John Kennedy, did not respond to a request for comment. 

Musk has been driving his claims of noncitizens voting for months. The Washington Post reported earlier in September that the false claims had election officials worried. Many told the newspaper that the posts coincided with a rise in requests to toss voter rolls and made them fearful over the possibility of violent threats in the lead-up to November. 

The owner of X also targeted a story from the Los Angeles Times that found that immigration authorities were approving citizenship applications “at the fastest speed in years.” The Times highlighted that right-wing figures were making “baseless claims” and included a statement from Naree Ketudat, a spokesperson for the US Department of Homeland Security. 

She said that the agency has processed naturalization petitions within a six-month period for decades and that the department “does not take actions based on electoral politics or upcoming elections. Period.” 

So, all of it was wrong. But Musk has not let facts get in the way of posting through it.

Enlarge / A woman wearing a sweatshirt for the QAnon conspiracy theory on October 11, 2020 in Ronkonkoma, New York. (credit: Stephanie Keith | Getty Images)

Belief in conspiracy theories is rampant, particularly in the US, where some estimates suggest as much as 50 percent of the population believes in at least one outlandish claim. And those beliefs are notoriously difficult to debunk. Challenge a committed conspiracy theorist with facts and evidence, and they'll usually just double down—a phenomenon psychologists usually attribute to motivated reasoning, i.e., a biased way of processing information.

A new paper published in the journal Science is challenging that conventional wisdom, however. Experiments in which an AI chatbot engaged in conversations with people who believed at least one conspiracy theory showed that the interaction significantly reduced the strength of those beliefs, even two months later. The secret to its success: the chatbot, with its access to vast amounts of information across an enormous range of topics, could precisely tailor its counterarguments to each individual.

"These are some of the most fascinating results I've ever seen," co-author Gordon Pennycook, a psychologist at Cornell University, said during a media briefing. "The work overturns a lot of how we thought about conspiracies, that they're the result of various psychological motives and needs. [Participants] were remarkably responsive to evidence. There's been a lot of ink spilled about being in a post-truth world. It's really validating to know that evidence does matter. We can act in a more adaptive way using this new technology to get good evidence in front of people that is specifically relevant to what they think, so it's a much more powerful approach."

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Melania Trump broke her months-long silence on the assassination attempt against her husband with a video that amplified unproven conspiracy theories about the July shooting before swiftly turning to promote her forthcoming memoir.

The video—which, in my opinion, resembles a deep fake overlaid with a Kris Jenner filter— was posted to X on Tuesday morning, and featured Melania standing before a black backdrop while ominous music plays in the background. “The attempt to end my husband’s life was a horrible, distressing experience,” she says, addressing the camera. “Now, the silence around it feels heavy. I can’t help but wonder, why didn’t law enforcement officials arrest the shooter before the speech?”

“There is definitely more to the story,” she adds, “and we need to uncover the truth.” A visual of the cover of her eponymous book then flashes on the screen, along with a message encouraging followers to order the book at her website. It’s unclear what, if any, connection the memoir, slated for release in early October according to the publisher, will have to her husband’s shooting. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions.

The rare video appearance makes Melania now one of many people in Trump’s orbit who has conspiratorially suggested that nefarious forces enabled the shooting. As my colleague Mark Follman has covered, two of Trump’s sons, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), and Republicans in Congress have cast blame on Democrats for the shooting—all without evidence. (As Mark reported, the motive of the shooter—who was a registered Republican—remains unknown.) Trump himself has also taken part in the narrative, telling television psychologist Dr. Phil in a late August interview, “I think to a certain extent it’s Biden’s fault and Harris’ fault. And I’m the opponent. Look, they were weaponizing government against me, they brought in the whole DOJ to try and get me. They weren’t too interested in my health and safety.”

“They’re saying I’m a threat to democracy,” Trump added in that interview. “They would say that, that was [a] standard line, just keep saying it, and you know that can get assassins or potential assassins going…Maybe that bullet is because of their rhetoric.”

Experts warn that such unfounded allegations can give rise to retaliatory violence from Trump-loving extremists.

This continuing vilification adds to what law enforcement and threat assessment sources have told me is a paramount risk headed toward the election: potential bloodshed stemming from Donald Trump’s long-running campaign of incitement, including his message that he is supposedly the victim of a sweeping conspiracy by his political opponents. That core Trump narrative has now been supercharged by the assassination attempt, in which three attendees also were shot, one fatally.

As Melania mentions in her video, questions do remain about the catastrophic security failures that allowed the shooter to scale a roof without law enforcement intervening sooner. But those questions are the subjects of ongoing federal investigations—which will not be led or solved by Melania or anyone else in MAGA-world.

Melania Trump broke her months-long silence on the assassination attempt against her husband with a video that amplified unproven conspiracy theories about the July shooting before swiftly turning to promote her forthcoming memoir.

The video—which, in my opinion, resembles a deep fake overlaid with a Kris Jenner filter— was posted to X on Tuesday morning, and featured Melania standing before a black backdrop while ominous music plays in the background. “The attempt to end my husband’s life was a horrible, distressing experience,” she says, addressing the camera. “Now, the silence around it feels heavy. I can’t help but wonder, why didn’t law enforcement officials arrest the shooter before the speech?”

“There is definitely more to the story,” she adds, “and we need to uncover the truth.” A visual of the cover of her eponymous book then flashes on the screen, along with a message encouraging followers to order the book at her website. It’s unclear what, if any, connection the memoir, slated for release in early October according to the publisher, will have to her husband’s shooting. The Trump campaign did not immediately respond to questions.

The rare video appearance makes Melania now one of many people in Trump’s orbit who has conspiratorially suggested that nefarious forces enabled the shooting. As my colleague Mark Follman has covered, two of Trump’s sons, Trump’s running mate, Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio), and Republicans in Congress have cast blame on Democrats for the shooting—all without evidence. (As Mark reported, the motive of the shooter—who was a registered Republican—remains unknown.) Trump himself has also taken part in the narrative, telling television psychologist Dr. Phil in a late August interview, “I think to a certain extent it’s Biden’s fault and Harris’ fault. And I’m the opponent. Look, they were weaponizing government against me, they brought in the whole DOJ to try and get me. They weren’t too interested in my health and safety.”

“They’re saying I’m a threat to democracy,” Trump added in that interview. “They would say that, that was [a] standard line, just keep saying it, and you know that can get assassins or potential assassins going…Maybe that bullet is because of their rhetoric.”

Experts warn that such unfounded allegations can give rise to retaliatory violence from Trump-loving extremists.

This continuing vilification adds to what law enforcement and threat assessment sources have told me is a paramount risk headed toward the election: potential bloodshed stemming from Donald Trump’s long-running campaign of incitement, including his message that he is supposedly the victim of a sweeping conspiracy by his political opponents. That core Trump narrative has now been supercharged by the assassination attempt, in which three attendees also were shot, one fatally.

As Melania mentions in her video, questions do remain about the catastrophic security failures that allowed the shooter to scale a roof without law enforcement intervening sooner. But those questions are the subjects of ongoing federal investigations—which will not be led or solved by Melania or anyone else in MAGA-world.

At a Tuesday panel dedicated to “Protecting the Vote” at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, an expert speaker sounded as if he was holding back tears as he explained what motivates him to do the work.

His wife gave birth to a son just two weeks ago, he shared. Suddenly, his job wasn’t just about protecting democracy for the country, but also for his newborn. “I have to fight for his ability to continue to be a respected member of his community and a citizen of his country in a full way,” said Jake Kenswil, director of voter protection at the Democratic National Committee.

“This subject is emotional for us,” said Yvette Lewis, another speaker and the former chair of the Maryland Democratic Party. “What we need you to do is to be just as emotional when you’re talking to your communities,” she added, “and get them to feel what we hope we made you feel today—which is the urgency of why this is so very important.”

But there weren’t many people there to hear their pressing message. In a conference room that could have accommodated hundreds, less than 40 people showed; out of two dozen press-reserved seats, only one was filled (mine). The sparsely attended meeting hosted by Democratic legal experts belies the tremendous threat to voter confidence proliferating this cycle: Deepfake videos projecting fictitious messages from seemingly real officials. Disingenuous lawsuits amplifying debunked theories of fraud. Widespread challenges to voter rolls. Stricter laws on voter identification documentation. Plus, a torrent of requests and threats to local election workers trying to hold down the fort through all of the tumult.

“We have a lot of work to do to prepare for early voting, to ensure our elections are secure, [and] to protect the accuracy of our laws,” Michigan Secretary of State Jocelyn Benson told me the following day. “And every minute we spend worrying or thinking about planning to protect against these threats is a minute that’s taken away from our ability to do our jobs.”

Wendy Weiser, vice president of the Brennan Center for Justice, has a theory on the event’s low attendance Tuesday: “Lawyers are boring,” she, a lawyer herself, quipped at a separate event on Wednesday. Moreover, elected officials and election security experts have some trust in reforms that have occurred since President Donald Trump’s supporters infamously broke into the Capitol to overthrow the 2020 election on January 6, 2021.

“There is no legitimate loophole through which somebody can steal an election. It is actually illegal to throw out legitimate votes. It is illegal to reject certification. It is illegal to try to thwart a congressional count,” she said, pointing to the 2022 Electoral Count Reform Act, which raised the threshold for members of Congress to challenge the Electoral College and clarified the role of the vice president in election certification.

That being said, with significant progress on protecting the sanctity of elections has come more aggressive tactics to undermine it. “There’s been a strengthening of safeguards,” Weiser said. “There’s also been an increase in risk level.”

In the spring, Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump went on conservative cable news channel Newsmax to talk about the GOP’s efforts to ensure her father-in-law, former President Trump, is pleased with the election outcome in November.

“We have lawsuits in 81 states right now,” she said. Late-night television talk-show host Jimmy Kimmel was quick to mock her slip-up on elementary-level geography. “Not just Tennessee, eleven-essee, twelve-essee,” Kimmel joked about the impossible number of states. “West Dakota, South Virginia. Indiana, Out-diana, you name it—they’re suing.”

But as I reported in the September-October issue of Mother Jones, her claim was barely an exaggeration.

The RNC says it is already involved in at least 78 election-related lawsuits in 23 states, often working with white-shoe law firms—including Consovoy McCarthy, which employs multiple former clerks to Supreme Court Justice Clarence Thomas, who may eventually be called upon to hear the merits of some of the cases. Several of them focus on longtime GOP bugaboos, like signature verification laws and absentee voting protocols. Others are dressed-up versions of Trump’s wilder conspiracies, including his claim that a “tremendous number of dead people” cast ballots in 2020. Importantly, the buckshot legal onslaught is preemptive, not defensive, and appears intended to cast doubt on the legitimacy of the 2024 election results. 

Despite the GOP’s claims repeatedly failing in courts, the lawsuits are effective in the sense that they “create smoke” before judges ultimately dismiss them, said Weiser. “They are exploiting a loophole in the system: Courts are slow.”

In our interview, Benson agreed that Republican National Committee lawsuits in Michigan—such as challenges to her state’s voter roll maintenance—are merely “an effort to drive a PR campaign, to drive a public narrative that sows seeds of distrust,” she said. “When the lawsuits ultimately get dismissed, the damage has already been done.”

Lawsuits aren’t the only weapon in the right’s arsenal. Several GOP-led states have enacted stricter voter identification laws that will increase barriers for voters who don’t possess identification for a variety of reasons. Election deniers are also running and winning positions in local election administration. Conservatives in Georgia are pushing for the ability to challenge voter registrations with limited data. And without an ounce of credible evidence, Trump also continues to insinuate there is fraud afoot, especially if he loses.

He maintains that the only way Democrats could win in 2024 is if they cheat. Therefore, he adds, his lead at the ballot box needs to be “too big to rig.” On the question of whether he will accept the 2024 results, Trump said during the June presidential debate: “If it’s a fair and legal and good election.” 

Legal experts on the left are countering Trump’s steady drumbeat of lies with tactics like publishing information about election rules in multiple languages, ensuring Democrat-allied lawyers observe court hearings related to election rules, and building relationships with local election boards to build trust, the panelists explained Tuesday.

At the state level, officials are also implementing new tools to fight the second iteration of the Big Lie.

Benson shared that her office is connecting overwhelmed election officials in her state with organizations that provide free legal support. Under her leadership, Michigan has also launched a “Democracy Ambassadors” program that distributes newsletters disproving election rumors and sharing helpful facts. The state has also emboldened messengers such as religious leaders and athletes to serve as sources of credible election information.

Michigan has also held “tabletop exercises that enable scenario planning and partnership building between law enforcement, first responders and clerks, so that there’s a direct line for them to call if something happens.”

“We at our office have all the information necessary to assure voters that their votes will be safe—their votes will be counted,” she added.

Efforts to fortify trust and stability in the electoral process will hopefully ensure that the vote of Kenswil’s newborn son will also be counted…in 18 years’ time.