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.
The Washington Post
Trump moves to legally enforce 2020 election denialism
An official from the first Trump administration is being targeted for speaking the truth.
April 10, 2025
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.
It could have ended there. But allegations that the 2020 election had been negatively influenced, leading to Trump’s loss, snowballed. Because early claims about explicit fraud and illegal voting were not substantiated, the pro-Trump narrative began to center more heavily on allegations that the outcome had been rigged. Voters, it held, had been unduly influenced by the suppression of information or false claims about politically potent issues. For example, that social media companies had briefly limited the sharing of a story about Joe Biden’s son eventually became a central element of the idea that they had been acting on behalf of the left.
As people learned that those companies had been briefed about potential foreign threats, a narrative emerged that the government had told the companies to limit the story — however incongruous it was that the government was at that time led by Trump himself. (What’s more, there’s no evidence that the brief restriction significantly affected the election.) Just as it had done before the election, the right attributed to malice and deviousness what was more easily and more accurately explained as explicable responses to evolving circumstances.
CISA’s rejection of Trump’s claims was fading into history until Wednesday, when Trump announced that he was removing Krebs’s security clearance and calling for the Justice Department to launch a fishing expedition, seeking out any scintillas of illegality in which Krebs or CISA might theoretically have been engaged. It was as explicit a manifestation of Trump’s vengeful worldview as anything we’ve seen since his second inauguration. There remains no evidence at all that CISA or Krebs engaged in any systematic effort to violate the law or even to combat disinformation because of ideology rather than factuality.
The president’s targeting of Krebs is in part a product of the massive economy Trump created by denying the 2020 election results. Loyalists who alleged fraud or left-wing deviousness were showered with the pro-Trump right’s most important currency: attention. Not that they didn’t believe Trump’s claims about rigging and theft, mind you; the idea that the election had been determined by nefarious elites is inherently appealing on the right. Particularly given how many Trump supporters knew no supporters of Joe Biden, the results seemed facially incomprehensible to many of them. So, sure. It was the elites.
CISA was a frequent target of these increasingly complicated narratives about 2020 and its aftermath, thanks in part to Elon Musk. The billionaire fully bought into the idea that social media companies had acted against the right, so he bought Twitter and allowed writers who bore obvious hostility to the establishment to cherry-pick from the company’s internal records. They cobbled together a contrived (and at times flatly erroneous) story about malfeasance into which CISA was looped. Boosted by Trump’s allies in Congress, the narrative gained the appearance of being credible, even though it wasn’t. Trump had the pretext he needed for Wednesday’s action.
In signing the executive order targeting Krebs, Trump made clear his intent.
“This was a disgraceful election,” he said about the 2020 contest. “And this guy” — Krebs — “sat back … and he’s tried to make the case that this election was a safe election. I think he said, ‘This is the safest election we’ve ever had.’ And yet every day you read in the papers about more and more fraud that’s discovered. He’s the fraud. He’s a disgrace. So we’ll find out whether or not it was a safe election.”
We’ve seen this before, from Trump and others in his second administration: Use the credibility of the office and the government to undermine reality in service of right-wing rhetoric. We need to see if vaccines and fluoride are safe, so we’re launching investigations (run by people who share our worldview). We need to revisit the allegations against the people who engaged in the Jan. 6, 2021, riot at the Capitol. We need to strip funding for research into climate change and instead boost coal production. And on and on and on.
Election denialism, though, holds a special place in Trump’s heart because he’s seemingly incapable of accepting that voters simply rejected him. Potential administration staffers were reportedly quizzed on their views about the election outcome, with employment apparently dependent on conforming with Trump’s position.
Targeting Krebs is in part about punishing perceived disloyalty and in part about overhauling reality. It is unquestionably also about leveraging the power of the state against a someone who had the temerity to insist that the truth was true. Calling for an investigation of Krebs is flatly authoritarian, perhaps more so than any other example of Trump going after his enemies.
It is a statement from the most powerful person in the country that the federal government will be deployed to monitor compliance with his worldview.