2024 U.S. Election of President and Vice President

[TopHatter]

Trump Is As Electable Now As He Was in 2016



Is it possible we’ve already forgotten what happened on Election Night in 2016? Photo: Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images

There are an awful lot of reasons for Republican elites to oppose the renomination of Donald Trump next year. He’s erratic and selfish as a party leader. He’s repudiated many historic GOP issue positions that Republicans would love to bring back and implement. His constant boasting and lying is embarrassing. And he’s not that much younger than Joe Biden, whose alleged decrepitude will be a major party talking point in 2024.

None of these concerns are terribly politic to say out loud; there’s a strong possibility that anyone who voices them will wind up in a scorching Truth Social post attacking RINOs and the party Establishment. So instead, would-be post-Trump Republicans prefer to talk about the 45th president’s alleged lack of “electability,” as The Atlantic’s Ron Brownstein found when exploring the Trump-o-phobia of GOP elites:
.

Jennifer Horn, the former Republican state party chair in New Hampshire and a leading Trump critic, told me that it’s likely the institutional resistance to him this time “will be stronger and more organized” than it was in 2016. Doubts about Trump’s electability, she added, could resonate with more GOP primary voters than opponents’ 2016 arguments against his morality or fealty to conservative principles did. “His biggest vulnerability in a primary is whether or not he can win a general election,” she said.

That sounds superficially plausible to those of us who saw Joe Biden defy the odds and win the 2020 Democratic nomination because Democratic voters (even more than elites) considered him electable. In this high-stakes era of polarized politics, with the two major parties roughly equal in strength, everybody is looking for a sure winner. But is Trump really any less viable of a candidate today than he was during the 2016 primary, when he steamrolled his more “electable” opponents?

An odd amnesia seems to have obliterated memories of how completely screwed Trump initially seemed as a prospective rival to Hillary Clinton. According to the RealClearPolitics polling averages from that year, Trump trailed Clinton by nearly 20 points in trial heats shortly after he announced his candidacy. Yes, he did better in later polls, but despite the partisan hype, few people were convinced he would win. He was all but written off by a variety of party figures after the Access Hollywood tapes came out in October 2016. Republican senators Kelly Ayotte, John Thune, Deb Fischer, Mike Crapo, Cory Gardner, Mark Kirk, Lisa Murkowski, and Dan Sullivan, as well as governors Gary Herbert and Bill Haslam, all renounced their support for him instantly. Then–Speaker of the House Paul Ryan told his members they should feel free to abandon their presidential nominee. How electable did he look then? Even when the furor had calmed down, there was a raging debate among pollsters and pundits aimed at Nate Silver’s allegedly too positive projection that Trump had a 29 percent chance of winning. And disputes about how so many people got so much of the 2016 election wrong dragged on for years.

So are we now supposed to believe that the Republicans who made Trump president in 2016 are going to write him off in 2024 because he can’t possibly win? The same Donald Trump who again defied the polls and nearly pulled off another shocker in 2020? And the same Republican voters who to a considerable extent believe Trump actually won a second time? This does not make a great deal of sense.

Some Trump critics suggest that the former president proved himself unelectable when “his” candidates (for the Senate, at least) did poorly in 2022. There’s some sleight of hand in that argument. Sure, some bad Senate candidates endorsed by Trump lost winnable races in 2022. But it’s a different matter to claim that they lost because of Trump’s support, showing how toxic his “brand” had become. The counterargument from MAGA-land, of course, is that just as Republican underperformed in the 2018 midterms, the 2022 results showed the GOP needs Trump on the ballot to win. It’s not an argument that’s easy to brush off.

Advocates for Trump’s non-electability also need to come to grips with the fact that (so far, at least) Trump is not looking particularly weak in head-to-head polls for a prospective rematch with Joe Biden. According to RCP’s averages of Trump-versus-Biden trial heats, the ex-president currently leads the sitting president by an eyelash (44.6 percent to 44.4 percent). How does the presumed beneficiary of all this fear about Trump’s electability do? Ron DeSantis trails Biden in trial heats 42.8 percent to 43.2 percent. There’s not much difference between the two Republicans’ performance against the incumbent, but again: Where’s the evidence that DeSantis is so vastly more electable that Republican should risk the wrath of Trump’s base (and even a possible third-party run) by dumping him?

I am reminded of the 1968 Republican presidential-nomination contest in which Nelson Rockefeller ran incessantly on the theme that he was more electable than Richard Nixon. But on the eve of the Republican convention when the deal would go down, Rocky was devastated by a poll showing Nixon running ahead of him against putative Democratic nominee Hubert Humphrey. Anti-Trump Republicans would be prudent to come right out with substantive arguments about why it would be a bad idea to let Donald Trump slither back into the White House instead of hiding behind “electability” concerns that may soon be as ephemeral as Hillary Clinton’s unassailable lead in 2016.
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[TopHatter]

Trump, Vowing 'Retribution,' Foretells a Second Term of Spite

Donald Trump has for decades trafficked in the language of vengeance, from his days as a New York developer vowing “an eye for an eye” in the real estate business to ticking through an enemies ledger in 2022 as he sought to oust every last Republican who voted for his impeachment. “Four down and six to go,” he cheered in a statement as one went down to defeat.

But even though payback has long been part of his public persona, Trump’s speech on Saturday at the Conservative Political Action Conference was striking for how explicitly he signaled that any return trip to the White House would amount to a term of spite.

“In 2016, I declared, ‘I am your voice,’” Trump told the crowd in National Harbor, Maryland. “Today, I add: I am your warrior. I am your justice. And for those who have been wronged and betrayed, I am your retribution.”

He repeated the phrase for emphasis: “I am your retribution.”

Framing the 2024 election as a dire moment in an us-versus-them struggle — “the final battle,” as he put it — Trump charged forward in an uncharted direction for American politics, talking openly about leveraging the power of the presidency for political reprisals.

His menacing declaration landed differently in the wake of the pro-Trump mob’s assault on the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in a last-ditch effort to keep him in power. The notion that Trump’s supporters could be spurred to violence is no longer hypothetical, as it was in 2016 when he urged a rally audience to “knock the crap out of” hecklers. The attack on the Capitol underscored that his most fanatical followers took his falsehoods and claims of victimhood seriously — and were willing to act on them.

While Trump has long walked up to a transgressive line, he has often managed to avoid unambiguously crossing it, leaving his intentions just uncertain enough to allow his supporters to say he is being mistreated or misinterpreted.

Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for Trump, said the speech was “a call to political action to defeat the Democrats who have put their collective boot on the throats of Americans,” adding, “Anyone who thinks otherwise is either being disingenuous or is outright lying because they know President Trump continues to be a threat to the political establishment.”

But John Bolton, a national security adviser under Trump who later broke publicly with him, had little doubt what the former president meant on Saturday. “I think he’s talking about retribution he would exact on people who would cross him,” said Bolton, who also served as ambassador to the United Nations. The reference was not about Trump’s supporters, Bolton said, but about Trump himself.

“It would be, first and foremost, getting back at the people he thinks deserve some kind of punishment for not doing what he tells them to do,” Bolton said. “And it’s a big group of people.”

After Bolton’s public falling-out with Trump, the former ambassador wrote a detailed book about his time working for the president, describing his behavior as “obstruction of justice as a way of life” and depicting Trump as endlessly transactional. When Trump could not persuade a federal judge to block the book’s publication, he threatened Bolton on Twitter.

Trump’s comments on Saturday were in his prepared remarks, rather than being off the cuff. His aides seemed pleased with the inherently sinister tone. The remarks were quickly packaged and pinned atop his campaign’s “War Room” Twitter page, and “I am your retribution,” in all capital letters, was turned into the subject line of a fundraising email.

Trump’s speech was laced with allusions to Gov. Ron DeSantis of Florida, so far the chief threat to his winning another nomination. He referred, for instance, to “some in our party” who have been open to cutbacks in Social Security. “I wonder who that might be,” Trump mocked.

Casting himself as a “warrior” was another reminder that Trump is generally determined to let no one — including a Florida governor fresh off clashes with The Walt Disney Co. and the College Board — evince more strength than the former president in warring with the left and its perceived allies.

Facing investigations in two states and in two cases overseen by the Justice Department, Trump repeatedly insisted that the judicial system should not be trusted, holding himself and his supporters up as the true arbiters of justice. Trump said the same day that he would not exit the presidential race if he were indicted.

Bolton pointed to another part of Trump’s speech: “This is it. Either they win or we win. And if they win, we no longer have a country.”

“I think that’s also a signal that he’s not going to accept a second defeat, the same way he didn’t accept the first defeat,” Bolton said of Trump’s election lies. Bolton suggested Trump’s efforts to stay in power were not a well-oiled plan, but a series of day-to-day impulses he was acting on. But what Trump is saying now, Bolton said, is different.

In essence, Bolton said, the former president is “pretty much calling for something close to civil insurrection.”

Mick Mulvaney, who served as Trump’s acting chief of staff, saw the speech in terms of its potential to turn off general-election voters who rejected the former president in 2020.

“It’s a great line for his hard-core supporters,” said Mulvaney, who attended a recent donor retreat hosted by DeSantis. “But he just lost another two points with suburban women in the Midwest.”

Planning is already underway for 2025 should Trump win the White House again. Advisers have discussed reimposing a Trump-era executive order, known as Schedule F, that would give the president vast power to replace what have traditionally been civil service workers embedded across the federal bureaucracy.

Trump alluded to those efforts on Saturday.

“I will totally obliterate the deep state,” he said, “I will fire …” he went on, before being interrupted by applause and “USA! USA!” chants. “I will fire the unelected bureaucrats and shadow forces who have weaponized our justice system like it has never been weaponized before.”

Trump has for decades sought to play the role of victim and vowed vengeance on those who cross him, beginning in 1973 with the first Justice Department investigation into what it said were his family business’ racially discriminatory housing practices, a case he eventually settled. He cried foul in August when the FBI searched his private club, Mar-a-Lago, for classified documents that he had not turned over despite a grand jury subpoena. And he has railed against that investigation and the state inquiries in New York and Georgia, denouncing both prosecutors in those states — who are Black — as “racist” for looking into him.

Jason Stanley, a Yale University professor who wrote the book “How Fascism Works: The Politics of Us and Them,” said the danger in undermining trust in the rule of law was that it left little alternative to overthrowing or overturning the system itself.

“This is the final battle,” Trump said Saturday. “They know it, I know it, you know it, everybody knows it.”

Stanley said that such language was all the more notable given the context of Jan. 6. “He’s saying it’s a war,” he said. “There is not law versus chaos, there is just him versus his enemies, your enemies.”

He added bluntly, “Trump engages in fascist rhetoric.”

Last month, Hugh Hewitt, the conservative radio host, asked Trump directly if he would “use the powers of the presidency to punish people who punished you.”

“No, I wouldn’t do that,” Trump said, before indulging the topic further. “I would be entitled to a revenge tour, if you want to know the truth,” he said, “but I wouldn’t do that.”

Demanding unconditional loyalty — and promising retaliation if he doesn’t get it — has been so much a fixture of his career that former employees at his company often say the public still doesn’t fully understand what he is capable of.

“If given the opportunity, I will get even with some people that were disloyal to me,” Trump told Charlie Rose in a November 1992 interview about those who had crossed him during his recent financial struggles.

One dissident member of a board he dealt with, Trump said, was finally removed “after being hit over the head with a cannon.”

“What was the cannon?” Rose asked.

“The cannon,” Trump replied, “was me.”
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He knows what his base wants. The man knows how to feed the sheep and stoke the flames of "righteous" fury.

[statquo]

Trump, Vowing 'Retribution,' Foretells a Second Term of Spite

He knows what his base wants. The man knows how to feed the sheep and stoke the flames of "righteous" fury.

"He can't beat Biden"

"He can't win a general election"

Whenever I hear this I cringe. This isn't the campaign of Covid 2020. And if this forecasted recession ever comes... that could be his ticket back into the oval office. And this time, you'll have a prepared, organized, angry Trump administration ready to take over the procedures and mechanisms of government. They've learned from 2020.

[TopHatter]

"He can't beat Biden"

"He can't win a general election"

Whenever I hear this I cringe. This isn't the campaign of Covid 2020. And if this forecasted recession ever comes... that could be his ticket back into the oval office. And this time, you'll have a prepared, organized, angry Trump administration ready to take over the procedures and mechanisms of government. They've learned from 2020.

And from the other side of the spectrum:

"He's out of power, let it go!"

"TDS"!

"He's living rent-free in your head"!

Cancer also lives rent-free in one's head. Trump shares much in common with a tumor.

[statquo]

And from the other side of the spectrum:

"He's out of power, let it go!"

"TDS"!

"He's living rent-free in your head"!

Cancer also lives rent-free in one's head. Trump shares much in common with a tumor.

They're just trolling though. It's like the years before the 2020 election.

Everyone: "He's not going to accept an election loss. He'll try remaining in power"

Trump supporters: "You guys are obsessed with Trump.. lol. TDS!"

*Trump doesn't accept election loss. Ensuing Insurrection commences"

Trump supporters: Stop the Steal! It's rigged!

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It was laughably predictable then.. it still is today/. That's why a second Trump term should terrify everyone.

[TopHatter]

They're just trolling though. It's like the years before the 2020 election.

Everyone: "He's not going to accept an election loss. He'll try remaining in power"

Trump supporters: "You guys are obsessed with Trump.. lol. TDS!"

*Trump doesn't accept election loss. Ensuing Insurrection commences"

Trump supporters: Stop the Steal! It's rigged!

---------------------------

It was laughably predictable then.. it still is today/. That's why a second Trump term should terrify everyone.

There's no end to how far back they'll move those goalposts.

Also: "It wasn't a real insurrection!"

[rj1]

"He can't beat Biden"

"He can't win a general election"

Whenever I hear this I cringe. This isn't the campaign of Covid 2020. And if this forecasted recession ever comes... that could be his ticket back into the oval office. And this time, you'll have a prepared, organized, angry Trump administration ready to take over the procedures and mechanisms of government. They've learned from 2020.

They had the procedures and mechanisms of government from 2017-21 and did incredibly little with them because they were incompetent. So for the past 14 years in our executive branch it's largely been one-sided Democratic influence. For a candidate that ran so against the Swamp, Trump's revolving door of Cabinet Secretaries is a sharp mark against him, because when a Cabinet Department does not have established leadership that sees eye to eye with the executive, what that means is the department is ran by career servant unelected bureaucrats, i.e. the Swamp. Contrast to Biden who just lost his first Cabinet Secretary in Marty Walsh more than 2 years into his term.

[Albany Rifles]

"career servant unelected bureaucrats"

Do you mean the professionals who do the day to business of government for this country and often know much more than the political appointees at the top?

They are doing the work for which they were hired, on annual budgets approved by Congress and also follows rules as set by Congress. Without the "bureaucracy" the gears of government would grind to halt pretty damn quickly.

[tbm3fan]

They had the procedures and mechanisms of government from 2017-21 and did incredibly little with them because they were incompetent. So for the past 14 years in our executive branch it's largely been one-sided Democratic influence. For a candidate that ran so against the Swamp, Trump's revolving door of Cabinet Secretaries is a sharp mark against him, because when a Cabinet Department does not have established leadership that sees eye to eye with the executive, what that means is the department is ran by career servant unelected bureaucrats, i.e. the Swamp. Contrast to Biden who just lost his first Cabinet Secretary in Marty Walsh more than 2 years into his term.

I'm going to have to side with AR on this. Many, many times the CEO of anything doesn't know all that is going on and definitely knows little of the nitty gritty daily activities to run any organization. That is why people are hired who are well versed in daily operations. A Department Secretary is no different than a CEO and many times knows far less than an average CEO does about his company.

[Monash]

I might also add that when a person in a position (any position) of high authority has a revolving door of senior and supposedly experienced advisers at some point the question has to be asked 'is it them or him'. Last election the US public clearly came down on the 'him' side. Donald? Well I'm afraid he's simply just not self aware enough to even frame that question, let alone answer it honestly.

[TopHatter]

"career servant unelected bureaucrats"

Do you mean the professionals who do the day to business of government for this country and often know much more than the political appointees at the top?

They are doing the work for which they were hired, on annual budgets approved by Congress and also follows rules as set by Congress. Without the "bureaucracy" the gears of government would grind to halt pretty damn quickly.

I'm going to have to side with AR on this. Many, many times the CEO of anything doesn't know all that is going on and definitely knows little of the nitty gritty daily activities to run any organization. That is why people are hired who are well versed in daily operations. A Department Secretary is no different than a CEO and many times knows far less than an average CEO does about his company.

I'm going to go out on a limb and surmise that rj was actually making a damning indictment of what an incompetent trainwreck the Trump "Administration was. Exhibit A: Trump Administration's fumbling, bumbling revolving door of idiots and sycophants*, and how they failed to advance whatever Trump's political agenda was supposed to be...thereby leaving most departments free to be run by the same "Swamp" that Trump promised to drain.

This of course is yet more evidence that Trump never planned to win, likely never wanted to win, was the same indolent fool that he's always been even after he assumed the office, and thus never thus bothered to staff his Administration with competent people who could do their jobs according to his whims.

tl;dr Trump and his criminal Family had all the levers of power at their fingertips but they couldn't manage to do jack shit, relatively speaking.


*And once again, I'm not referring to people like Jim Mattis, H.R. McMaster or John Kelly.

[TopHatter]

I might also add that when a person in a position (any position) of high authority has a revolving door of senior and supposedly experienced advisers at some point the question has to be asked 'is it them or him'. Last election the US public clearly down on the 'him' side. Donald? Well I'm afraid he's simply just not self aware enough to even frame that question, let alone answer it honestly.

Bam. Bingo.

Trump bragged that as a highly successful businessman, he would hire "only the best people". The truth of course was, aside from outlier all-stars that left relatively quickly, his picks were mostly idiots like Steve Bannon and that ilk. I made a lengthy post about Trump's staff turnover a couple years ago.

However to sum up, Trump’s “A Team” turnover was 92% as of January 20, 2021
(Note: The “A Team” is made up of members of the executive office of the president, it does not include Cabinet secretaries.)

A former friend of mine that's a Kool-Aid drinking member of Cult45 would lament that Trump's staff pick's were terrible (only because they contradicted Trump, of course)

I didn't have the heart to tell him "Well, that's a sign of a really shitty businessman, not the successful businessman that you believes Trump to be."

[statquo]

They had the procedures and mechanisms of government from 2017-21 and did incredibly little with them because they were incompetent. So for the past 14 years in our executive branch it's largely been one-sided Democratic influence. For a candidate that ran so against the Swamp, Trump's revolving door of Cabinet Secretaries is a sharp mark against him, because when a Cabinet Department does not have established leadership that sees eye to eye with the executive, what that means is the department is ran by career servant unelected bureaucrats, i.e. the Swamp. Contrast to Biden who just lost his first Cabinet Secretary in Marty Walsh more than 2 years into his term.

That's what I mean though. They had incompetent idiots before. This time they'll come back with the know how and an actual plan.

I wouldn't be surprised if they're stockpiling a huge roster of government loyalists and outside loyalists to immediately replace the everyday bureaucrats if he's elected. The Justice Department will be the first to go. They'll gut that entire department from top to bottom and staff it with Trump loyalists at every level, qualified or not.. We can look at other countries that slipped into autocracy to predict that.

[TopHatter]

Thousands of pro-Trump bots are attacking DeSantis, Haley

WASHINGTON (AP) — Over the past 11 months, someone created thousands of fake, automated Twitter accounts — perhaps hundreds of thousands of them — to offer a stream of praise for Donald Trump.

Besides posting adoring words about the former president, the fake accounts ridiculed Trump's critics from both parties and attacked Nikki Haley, the former South Carolina governor and U.N. ambassador who is challenging her onetime boss for the 2024 Republican presidential nomination.

When it came to Ron DeSantis, the bots aggressively suggested that the Florida governor couldn't beat Trump, but would be a great running mate.

As Republican voters size up their candidates for 2024, whoever created the bot network is seeking to put a thumb on the scale, using online manipulation techniques pioneered by the Kremlin to sway the digital platform conversation about candidates while exploiting Twitter's algorithms to maximize their reach.

The sprawling bot network was uncovered by researchers at Cyabra, an Israeli tech firm that shared its findings with The Associated Press. While the identity of those behind the network of fake accounts is unknown, Cyabra's analysts determined that it was likely created within the U.S.

To identify a bot, researchers will look for patterns in an account's profile, its follower list and the content it posts. Human users typically post about a variety of subjects, with a mix of original and reposted material, but bots often post repetitive content about the same topics.

That was true of many of the bots identified by Cyabra.

“One account will say, ‘Biden is trying to take our guns; Trump was the best,’ and another will say, ‘Jan. 6 was a lie and Trump was innocent,'" said Jules Gross, the Cyabra engineer who first discovered the network. "Those voices are not people. For the sake of democracy I want people to know this is happening.”

Bots, as they are commonly called, are fake, automated accounts that became notoriously well-known after Russia employed them in an effort to meddle in the 2016 election. While big tech companies have improved their detection of fake accounts, the network identified by Cyabra shows they remain a potent force in shaping online political discussion.

The new pro-Trump network is actually three different networks of Twitter accounts, all created in huge batches in April, October and November 2022. In all, researchers believe hundreds of thousands of accounts could be involved.

The accounts all feature personal photos of the alleged account holder as well as a name. Some of the accounts posted their own content, often in reply to real users, while others reposted content from real users, helping to amplify it further.

“McConnell... Traitor!” wrote one of the accounts, in response to an article in a conservative publication about GOP Senate leader Mitch McConnell, one of several Republican critics of Trump targeted by the network.

One way of gauging the impact of bots is to measure the percentage of posts about any given topic generated by accounts that appear to be fake. The percentage for typical online debates is often in the low single digits. Twitter itself has said that less than 5% of its active daily users are fake or spam accounts.

When Cyabra researchers examined negative posts about specific Trump critics, however, they found far higher levels of inauthenticity. Nearly three-fourths of the negative posts about Haley, for example, were traced back to fake accounts.

The network also helped popularize a call for DeSantis to join Trump as his vice presidential running mate — an outcome that would serve Trump well and allow him to avoid a potentially bitter matchup if DeSantis enters the race.

The same network of accounts shared overwhelmingly positive content about Trump and contributed to an overall false picture of his support online, researchers found.

“Our understanding of what is mainstream Republican sentiment for 2024 is being manipulated by the prevalence of bots online," the Cyabra researchers concluded.

The triple network was discovered after Gross analyzed Tweets about different national political figures and noticed that many of the accounts posting the content were created on the same day. Most of the accounts remain active, though they have relatively modest numbers of followers.

A message left with a spokesman for Trump's campaign was not immediately returned.

Most bots aren't designed to persuade people, but to amplify certain content so more people see it, according to Samuel Woolley, a professor and misinformation researcher at the University of Texas whose most recent book focuses on automated propaganda.

When a human user sees a hashtag or piece of content from a bot and reposts it, they're doing the network's job for it, and also sending a signal to Twitter's algorithms to boost the spread of the content further.

Bots can also succeed in convincing people that a candidate or idea is more or less popular than the reality, he said. More pro-Trump bots can lead to people overstating his popularity overall, for example.

“Bots absolutely do impact the flow of information,” Woolley said. “They're built to manufacture the illusion of popularity. Repetition is the core weapon of propaganda and bots are really good at repetition. They're really good at getting information in front of people's eyeballs."

Until recently, most bots were easily identified thanks to their clumsy writing or account names that included nonsensical words or long strings of random numbers. As social media platforms got better at detecting these accounts, the bots became more sophisticated.

So-called cyborg accounts are one example: a bot that is periodically taken over by a human user who can post original content and respond to users in human-like ways, making them much harder to sniff out.

Bots could soon get much sneakier thanks to advances in artificial intelligence. New AI programs can create lifelike profile photos and posts that sound much more authentic. Bots that sound like a real person and deploy deepfake video technology may challenge platforms and users alike in new ways, according to Katie Harbath, a fellow at the Bipartisan Policy Center and a former Facebook public policy director.

“The platforms have gotten so much better at combating bots since 2016,” Harbath said. "But the types that we're starting to see now, with AI, they can create fake people. Fake videos."

These technological advances likely ensure that bots have a long future in American politics — as digital foot soldiers in online campaigns, and as potential problems for both voters and candidates trying to defend themselves against anonymous online attacks.

“There’s never been more noise online,” said Tyler Brown, a political consultant and former digital director for the Republican National Committee. “How much of it is malicious or even unintentionally unfactual? It's easy to imagine people being able to manipulate that.”
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[TopHatter]

Russia tried to influence U.S. elections in 2022 and will do it again, nation’s top intel agency says

• Russia conducted malign influence operations in the 2022 U.S. midterm elections, the U.S. intelligence community said in a new report.
• Moscow will also work to “strengthen ties” to Americans in media and politics as it works to carry out “future influence operations,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said.
• The agency’s warning about Russian election meddling was starker and more certain than in its previous annual assessment.

Russia conducted malign influence operations in the 2022 U.S. midterm elections and is using increasingly clandestine means to “penetrate the Western information environment,” the U.S. intelligence community said in a new report Wednesday.

Moscow will also work to “strengthen ties” to Americans in media and politics as it works to carry out “future influence operations,” the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said in the latest edition of its annual assessment of worldwide threats to U.S. national security.

The 2023 report came four months after the most recent midterm elections, where concerns about Russian influence efforts were more muted in comparison with the two previous presidential election cycles in 2016 and 2020.

The intelligence community found that Russian President Vladimir Putin ordered an influence campaign in the 2016 election with a “clear preference” for then-candidate Donald Trump, who would go on to win that race.

Trump — who during that campaign had called on Russia to find his then-rival Hillary Clinton’s emails — later questioned whether Russia interfered in the 2016 election. During a meeting with Putin in 2018, Trump indicated that he believed the Russian leader’s claim that the Kremlin did not meddle in the 2016 race — essentially siding with Putin’s stance over his own intelligence community’s assessment. Trump later backtracked on those remarks.

Ahead of last November’s midterms, researchers reportedly identified Russian efforts to interfere by using social media accounts posing as Americans to stoke partisan anger and undermine trust in the electoral process. The FBI and the Department of Justice’s cybersecurity agency had warned ahead of the midterms that foreign actors were likely to try and spread disinformation before and after Election Day.

The office, which oversees the nation’s 18 intelligence agencies, added that this latest warning about Russian election meddling was starker and more certain than in its previous report.

In 2022, for instance, the office determined that Russia “almost certainly” sees U.S. elections as opportunities for malign influence to influence its foreign policy goals. Moscow will also “probably” try to cultivate relationships with U.S. figures in politics and the media “in hopes of developing vectors for future influence operations,” it said at that time.

In the 2023 edition, the agency dropped the words “almost certainly” and “probably” from its assessment.

The report added, “Russia’s influence actors have adapted their efforts to increasingly hide their hand,” using a “vast ecosystem of Russian proxy websites, individuals, and organizations that appear to be independent news sources.”

Through creating original content or seizing on preexisting divisive discourse, Moscow “intensifies that content to further penetrate the Western information environment,” according to the assessment. “These activities can include disseminating false content and amplifying information perceived as beneficial to Russian influence efforts or conspiracy theories.”

Russia’s already-tense relations with the U.S. and other Western powers have been hugely strained by the country’s invasion of Ukraine. The intelligence community warned in its threat assessment that Russia, which holds the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, is continuing to develop long-range nuclear-capable missiles.
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I wonder who Russia will favor in the 2024 Presidential Election....