Donald Trump stopped denouncing rigged elections when the first results were published

Donald Trump demanded from the Americans a “overwhelming victory”. He called on his voters to prevail beyond the “margin of fraud” – strange concept attributing to the Democratic party the ability to rig elections if the results are close. The American tribune was granted: he did not need the count in all the states to be complete to proclaim his victory, claiming to have obtained more electors, and, for the first time, to have won the popular vote.

Videos of torn ballots, migrants taken by the busload to vote illegally or even “proof” that dead people had voted… Disinformation professionals expected a surge of accusations from Donald Trump’s supporters after an election tight or lost.

The Trumpist camp suddenly stopped referring to it during the night of Tuesday November 5 to Wednesday November 6 (French time). Like the billionaire and influential supporter Elon Musk, who posted, on “Game, set and match” triumphant at the announcement of the results in North Carolina, the first of the six key states to turn red. “When you win, it’s always easier. This refers to what Donald Trump already said in 2016recalls Julien Giry, researcher in political science at the University of Tours and specialist in American conspiracyism. “If I win, that’s normal, if I lose, it’s the fraud’s fault.” »

Trump has contested the polls since 2012

This total victory puts an end to Donald Trump’s endless accusations of cheating. These are much older than we remember. As early as June 2012, he called for “put an end to electoral fraud”targeting the Democratic Party. Convinced that Mitt Romney was leading the popular vote against Barack Obama, he described the election as “masquerade” and called – already – to “march on Washington”.

Same winner, in 2016, he tweeted “that in addition to having largely won the electoral college”he had according to him “won the popular vote if you deduct the millions of people who voted illegally”. He will never give up, and will make electoral fraud the central theme of the 2020 election and its aftermath, in the name of “Stop the steal”, until the invasion of the Capitol , January 6, 2021.

Despite his indictment for “fraudulent conspiracy against the United States”, justified among other things by the dissemination of false information about the 2020 election, the tribune never gave up this conspiratorial discourse. From the summer, he began to warn against supposed Democratic cheating. Until the middle of the night from November 5 to 6, he shared on X numerous appeals to his voters to “stay in line”to vote despite the queues, and report the slightest problem on one of its partisan sites, Protect the Vote (“protect the vote”). A movement followed by its supporters. On Telegram, far-right groups have been mobilizing for weeks to “monitor the vote”.

But this time, conspiracy rhetoric was not used to deny the results. “In 2020, it arrived a posteriori, in any case in the last moments of the campaign, there he campaigned on it in the name of the American people, observe Julien Giry. This has been a central theme, which allows us to unite against corrupt elites and mobilize our electoral base, and to mobilize them around them. »

A flood of false information since October

A myriad of suspicious micro-stories have invaded Trumpist social networks since mid-October, when early voting had already started.

In total, the American verification site Lead Stories has unraveled more than sixty false information linked to the American elections since October 30, the vast majority of which concerns supposed electoral fraud. Among these, the rumor of discreet ballot marking to help Kamala Harris win in Kentucky; a video of a first-time voter, filmed from behind while he takes a selfie while casting his first ballot, presented as a « mule » responsible for filling the ballot box with false votes; or a bogus video accusing Democrats of having rigged the votes of inmates in three key states.

Each time, a minor anomaly came to light. One example, among many others: on October 31, the first day of early voting in Kentucky, a Trumpist voter filmed herself trying to vote, in vain, for the Republican candidate: the touch screen seemed unwilling accept his choice. Trumpist influencers like Nick Sortor are seizing on it to assert that voting machines, already the target of conspiracy theories in 2020, “do not allow voters to vote for Trump”. His video has been viewed more than two million times. In reality, said voter was tapping the wrong place on the screen, but her vote was ultimately counted correctly.

Russian interference in the home stretch

At the origin of this rich production, the Stakhanovist rhythm of pro-Trump conspiracy influencers, quick to relay the suspicious speech of the Republican candidate. “It’s linked to the breakdown of the QAnon movement, analyzes Dusan Bozalka, doctoral student in information sciences at Paris-II, at the Strategic Research Institute of the Military School and at George Washington University. Q [le compte anonyme qui nourrit la mythologie de QAnon] having stopped posting messages in 2020, he was replaced by Republican influencers who have made a career out of conspiracy. It’s a livelihood for them, because it generates traffic and therefore remuneration on X.”

The MAGA movement (acronym for Trump’s slogan, « Make America great again »“make America great again”) was also able to count on the help of Russian influence groups. On at least three occasions in the last two weeks, the American intelligence services have denounced electoral interference aimed at sowing doubt concerning the honesty of the vote, in the form of homemade videos broadcast on social networks. In one of them, a black man goes through pseudo-ballots and tears up those in the name of Donald Trump. In another, two black men pose as Haitian migrants preparing to vote for Kamala Harris at several different polling stations.

The state administrations of Pennsylvania and Georgia have formally contested their authenticity. These fakes have been attributed to Storm-1516, a Kremlin-linked disinformation group that previously operated in France during the Paris Olympics. The Internet user behind the account @AlphaFox78, a Trumpist activist who first relayed the video of fake Haitian voters, explained to the CNN news channel that he had been paid $100 by a pro-Kremlin propagandist to post it.

Did these misinformation have any impact? “It’s difficult to measure, admits Julien Giry, who recalls the importance of many other factors, notably political and sociological. We know that, in 2016, those who had been massively exposed to Trumpist conspiracy theories already belonged to a captive Republican audience, who would have voted for him no matter what. But it also serves to expand this electorate, to obtain marginal gains. » And obtain, as Donald Trump hoped, a victory too big to rig“too large to be faked”.