Trump Is Eroding Efforts to Fight Meddling in Vote

A Rise in Foreign Sway

Author

Matt Davis
February 21, 2025

Hello! For the new folks, the format is simple; I read the top story in the New York Times each morning so that you don’t have to. If you were forwarded this, you can subscribe here. Do please recommend the newsletter to your friends because once I have a thousand subscribers, I can start a cult, and that’s all any of us really wants to do in this life, isn’t it?

I’m up early to read the paper this morning, so that you don’t have to. Although I do apologize for the quality of the light. It’s very harsh, just like today’s lead story.

The front page of the paper today shows “an ‘abhorrent’ handover of remains” with members of Hamas bearing the coffin of an Israeli infant. It is not exactly Prozac to look at. Meanwhile the lead story today is by Steven Lee Myers, Julian E. Barns and Sheera Frenkel, and you can read it here. Or if you like, I’ll read it, so that you don’t have to…

“The Trump administration is targeting government officials who had been flagging foreign interference in U.S. elections, despite continuing concerns that adversaries are stoking political and social divisions by spreading propaganda and disinformation online, current and former government officials said.”

This falls under “what can possibly go wrong?”, right? Incidentally I was pleased and surprised to see the New York Post calling out Trump this morning for calling Volodymyr Zelensky a dictator. They keep the Post in the box with the firewood at the bodega but I snapped a quick shot:

The New York Post pointing out that Trump is “ignoring truths” this morning…

Still, the Post has been propping Trump up on every other morning I’ve been in there lately and frankly this is too little, too late. Back to the (related) erosion of foreign influence in elections…

The story says Trump’s people have already reassigned “several dozen” officials at the FBI and Department of Homeland Security. In last year’s election, “the teams tracked and publicized numerous influence operations from Russia, China and Iran to blunt their impact on unsuspecting voters.”

There is alarm that the cuts could leave America “defenseless” against this kind of interference, which of course would benefit the people who have made the cuts. Remember when Trump was up in arms about rigged elections after he lost? Not so much recently, I’ve noticed. It’s almost as if he were inconsistent!

“Arizona’s secretary of state, Adrian Fontes, a Democrat, warned in a letter to President Trump that the cuts were comparable to shutting down the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration ahead of hurricane season.”

If there’s one thing sure to make Trump cower it’s a strongly-worded letter from a politician from a rival party in a state where he’d like to win more often.

Meanwhile, Trump and others “have said that in the guise of fighting misinformation and disinformation, the government had infringed on free speech rights of Americans.” Republicans, in particular, have disagreed with Democrats about Russian propaganda, “and they viewed warnings about ‘disinformation’ as a way to pressure social media companies to censor speech supporting Mr. Trump’s views.”

It seems we’re saying anything smart infringes on free speech, lately. My efforts to pick up the trash and take it to the landfill infringe on free speech. My efforts to prevent children being killed in wars infringe on free speech. You get the gist.

This assessment is also at odds with the assessment of the “hawkish” Foundation for Defense of Democracies, which issued a report on foreign influence in November’s elections and said the U.S. government should continue to treat foreign malign influence as a “national security issue.” Speaking of starting a cult…

“I think that they may have drunk their own Kool-Aid in terms of believing that there is this kind of censorship industrial complex that all these people were involved in,” Lawrence Borden, a vice president at the progressive Brennan Center for Justice at New York University School of Law, said, referring to the officials now shutting down the teams. “I’m not sure that they fully understand who everybody is and what they do.”

I’m not sure that they fully understand who everybody is and what they do, either, Lawrence, to put it mildly. But it’s nice to see you evoking the Kool-Aid Massacre in the Times.

The story ends with a quote from JD Vance’s trip to Germany (the one where he told the Germans to vote Nazi) last week when he belittled accusations that resulted in Romania overturning the first round of voting in its elections recently.

“If your democracy can be destroyed with a few hundred thousands of dollars of digital advertising from a foreign country,” Mr Vance said, “then it wasn’t very strong to begin with.”

Clever. Undermine the idea that election interference is going on at all. Then admit that it’s going on but undermine how serious it is.

What’s fascinating about the reporting on this story today is that it gets to the Trump administration’s efforts to erode public belief in objective facts—again, that’s the larger goal of misinformation, generally. It’s why Trump doesn’t mind lying repeatedly in public. By lying, he gets people to say, “the people in power lie,” and so, he encourages people to disengage from an interest in government, and so, he’s able to prop up his own power. It’s self-fulfilling. I’m really coming to see it as all rather clever, honestly, now that I’m actually reading the newspaper so that you don’t have to.

When you uphold “free speech” and the supposed “strength” of American Democracy in the face of what you say are imagined efforts to undermine elections around the world, you undermine both the objective truth of those undermining efforts but also Americans’ willingness to defend free speech in a strong democracy.

The overall goal here is to demoralize those who would otherwise speak out against what’s going on in America, generally. Here’s Elon Musk a couple of days ago retweeting a Florida Republican’s reaction to a press conference opposing the appointment of the new FBI director, Kash Patel.

You’re welcome. Don’t drink the Kool-Aid.

Matt Davis lives in Manhattan with his wife and kid.