Trump moves to legally enforce 2020 election denialism

[Celerity]

An official from the first Trump administration is being targeted for speaking the truth.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2025/04/10/trump-krebs-election-denialism/

https://archive.ph/PcYE7


A sign next to a gas station in Worthington, Pennsylvania, on Dec. 30, 2021. (Michael S. Williamson/The Washington Post)

After the 2016 election, when it was understood that Russia had tried to influence the outcome, social media companies introduced a number of changes that allow them to better control misinformation and abuse on their platforms. One effect was that some prominent voices on the right found their posts being removed or muffled. It happened on the left as well, but on the right — in part because of the perceived politics of tech companies and Silicon Valley — these actions were attributed to partisanship rather than practicality. This argument soon trickled up to then-President Donald Trump.

Lower down on the administration’s organizational chart, though, officials were themselves working to ensure that the interference seen in 2016 didn’t occur in 2020. In October 2020, a Department of Homeland Security report identified evidence that foreign adversaries were “using covert and overt influence measures” to try to affect votes “and the electoral process itself.” Despite Trump’s insistence that the 2016 vote (and his election) hadn’t been affected by foreign interference, the government was responding to reality, briefing social media companies on threats and, in 2018, standing up the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) to address foreign threats, including against elections. Trump nominated Chris Krebs to lead the agency.

By all outward appearances, there was no foreign interference that affected the results of the ensuing 2020 presidential election. What there was, however, was a change in the occupant to the White House. You know what happened next. Trump, who had for months been stoking the idea that there was something uncertain or unstable about the U.S. electoral process, seized on the idea that the election had been stolen. During the weeks after the election, he embraced a wide variety of false and debunked assertions about how he’d been the victim of a left-wing plot to deny him a second term.

Anytime a new theory emerged about how the election might have been stolen, Trump shared it with the American public as if it were fact — which at no point it was. Among the claims he and his allies elevated was that electronic voting machines had been tampered with. Krebs, tasked with ensuring that this wouldn’t happen, put out a statement assuring Americans that election systems had not been manipulated. Trump took this badly. Within hours, he announced Krebs’s firing on Twitter, insisting that claims about the security of the election were false and flew in the face of available evidence. Again, the opposite was true; it was Trump’s claims that failed to comport with the evidence, much less reality.







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[kimbutgar]

1. Trying to rewrite history orange hitler?

We are closer to 1984 than we think if he gets his way. But I know some states will not comply with his illegal administration.