The Definition of Kremlinsanity is Taking the Same Approach to Malign Russian Influence and Expecting a Different Result

The tactics have changed in 2024, but the threat is real. Fortunately, the Intelligence Community is up to the task.

One week from today, Kamala Harris will defeat Donald Trump at the ballot box—resoundingly. It will be an historic ass-kicking. One week from today, Trump will earn the dubious distinction of being the first major-party presidential candidate to lose the popular vote three times in a row. He will become, quite literally, the biggest loser in the political history of the country.

On these pages last week, I made the case for why I believe Harris will beat Trump soundly in the Electoral College—and that was before Sunday’s MAGA Nazi Rally at Madison Square Garden. Our democracy may well have been saved by a lousy, racist insult comic’s delusional belief that he is the second coming of Don Rickles.

Most years, decisive wins in both the popular vote and the Electoral College mean that the race for the White House is over. But 2024, needless to say, is not “most years.”

With humiliating defeat—and with it, bankruptcy, criminal trials, and prison—looking him square in the doughy orange face, Trump will use every dirty trick up his sleeve to contest, invalidate, call into question, tamper with, and/or sabotage the certification of the vote—just like he did last time, but on a larger scale. He and his fascist allies have had four years to cook up innovative new schemes to overturn the election results and install their strongman in the Oval Office.

To that end, Ginni Thomas BFF Cleta Mitchell—the only prominent MAGA election lawyer from 2020 to escape indictment, despite being on the call when Trump leaned on the Georgia secretary of state to “find” more votes—has spent the entire Biden Administration organizing “grass-roots activists, Republican lawyers, party officials and deep-pocketed advocacy groups into a vast national network,” the New York Times reports:

The aim was nothing less than remaking American elections.

Over the past four years, Ms. Mitchell’s Election Integrity Network has done more than any other group to take Mr. Trump’s falsehoods about corruption in the democratic system and turn them into action. . .

All of this coordination allowed debunked theories to jump from state to state. The network was instrumental in prompting state officials, in rapid succession, to abandon a widely regarded election data system, for example.

Mitchell, per the Times, believes that “she was called by God to shift her attention to the possibility that noncitizens were voting.” I can’t speak for the Almighty—although He doesn’t typically move in ways this mysterious—but her cause in this antidemocratic endeavor has coincidentally been taken up by temporal forces more sinister and almost as mighty. As was the case in 2020 and in 2016, Trump has help again this year from his droogs in Moscow.

The Kremlin’s 2016 fuckery was a lark: a longshot attempt to weaken the United States and screw over Hillary Clinton, whom Putin despises. Everyone was surprised that Trump won, including Trump. This time, the stakes are higher. The crisis is existential. President Kamala Harris equals Russia losing the war equals Putin’s ignominious fall from power. The interests of Trump and Russia have never been more aligned. For Russia to have any hope of conquering Ukraine, and for Donald to evade his looming criminal trials, Trump must re-capture the White House.

The Kremlin helped Donald in 2016 and 2020. The Kremlin is helping him again now.

We know this because, first of all, Trump’s unofficial campaign manager and ersatz running mate, Elon Musk, is besties with Vladimir Putin. Per the Wall Street Journal, they call each other frequently, like Gen X teenagers. This is Paul Manafort working with that weirdo Russian intelligence officer, but leveled up, like an evil Soviet Pokémon. (Sidenote: Why does Trump keep outsourcing his campaign operations to Kremlin tools? Is that, like, a BFOQ for the job?)

We also know this because the Intelligence Community told us. Two weeks ago, the National Intelligence Council issued a declassified report with the not-very-subtle title, “Foreign Threats to US Elections After Voting Ends in 2024.” Let’s look at a few highlights:

While I have no doubt that China and Iran would benefit from U.S. instability, especially as the latter clashes with Israel in the Middle East, I don’t know that either state prefers one candidate over another. Iran has beef with Trump because he ordered the hit on Qasem Soleimani, true, but the country would stand to benefit more from a president who, last time he was in office, dismantled the nuclear treaty and essentially gave them free reign to manufacture weapons of mass destruction.

But Russia is different. Putin needs Trump to survive, as discussed. Look at the tenses here: The NCI memo says that Iran “may try” to hit at Trump; the Russians, by contrast, “have pushed” anti-Harris propaganda:

The Kremlin will continue to pull out all the proverbial stops to influence its desired outcome:

What jumps out at me about those passages is this: by attempting to “seek to disrupt or delay the time-sensitive and tightly sequenced series of processes and events that begin after polls close,” malign foreign actors—read: Russia—will be attempting to do what Trump and his allies tried in 2020, and are planning to try again this year: muck up the works, sow doubt and chaos, and hope some obscure technicality will achieve the desired outcome.

Meanwhile, the Kremlin’s assets in the United States have already been stirring up shit regarding the legitimacy of the vote—Stop the Steal 2.0. Cleta Mitchell may sincerely believe she was commanded by God to amplify the lie about illegal immigrants pouring over the border to vote for Kamala Harris, but I find it curious that her Lord just so happens to have the same message and motive as Vladimir Putin, as the NCI memo lays out:

Mitchell is not alone in disseminating bullshit. There are some 2,800 global Russian influence actors monitored by the Social Design Agency (SDA), a Kremlin operation whose domains were seized by the DOJ last month. That number includes 500-600 Americans. As the “Doppelganger” affidavit explains:

SDA extensively monitors and collects information about a large number of media organizations and social media influencers. One document revealed a list of more than 2,800 people on various social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Telegram, spanning 81 countries, that SDA identified as influencers, including television and radio hosts, politicians, bloggers, journalists, businessmen, professors, think-tank analysts, veterans, professors, and comedians. When referring to politicians, the list often mentioned which U.S. state and/or political party they represent and the position they hold in Congress. The U.S.-based influencers accounted for approximately 21% of the accounts being monitored by SDA.

I’m not sure if John Mark Dougan is on that list of Americans, but the former Palm Beach County sheriff’s deputy, who fled to Russia in the wake of the Doppelganger indictment, has allegedly been paid by the Kremlin to make deep-fake videos intended to smear Kamala Harris. The NCI memo alludes to this deceptive technique, too:

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We must be prepared, as the calendar flips to November, to encounter all manner of dirty tricks. There will be odd hashtags trending on X suggesting election malfeasance. There will be deep-fakes. There will be websites that look like the official sites for small counties in Pennsylvania or Michigan but which are actually spoofs. There will batshit crazy posts on Facebook amplified by the MAGA in our families.

We have to pause before reposting provocative material on social media. We have to verify everything. We have to be vigilant. And we have to call bullshit when we see bullshit.

Finally, and most ominously, Russia would like nothing more than violence, on Election Day or after. That’s why the Kremlin infiltrated the NRA—Putin wants more guns on the streets, because more guns increases the opportunities for bloodshed. This is a threat as well:

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It is heartening to see that the Intelligence Community is on it. It is heartening to watch the DOJ make arrests of bad actors and shut down phony websites. It is heartening to know that the Biden Administration takes the specter of Russian election interference seriously. It is heartening to see that the highly-redacted last page of the NCI memo, which presumably lays out the IC’s plans to thwart the Kremlin’s bullshit offensive, looks like this:

But the NCI memo only applies to foreign threats to US elections after voting ends next week. The domestic threats are just as real—and even more dangerous.

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Photo: Putin via the Kremlin, plus redactions.