Donald Trump Wants Imitation Democracy
So you want to steal an election, huh?
Mikhail Gorbachev was vacationing in occupied Crimea when he received, like the rest of the dwindling Soviet empire, an open letter from the godfather of glasnost.
Alexander Yakovlev was resigning from the Communist Party, warning that the Soviet state risked returning to a very dangerous form of autocracy. “I’d like to warn society that a powerful Stalinist group has been formed in the leadership of the party, which opposes the course chosen in 1985,” he wrote.
This shouldn’t have come as a terrible surprise to Gorbachev. His march toward liberalism, capitalism, and democracy was hotly contested. On one side were the military commanders and reactionaries who were desperate to keep the Soviet Union together and believed that the public must be brought to heel. On the other side were reformists who wanted change to come faster, and without control from a central state — figures like Boris Yeltsin, then head of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. It put Gorbachev in an awful tension.
Before he could figure which faction posed the biggest threat to the stability of his government, the reactionaries launched a coup. Glasnost and perestroika “have led to a dead end,” the military brass declared. Freedom had emboldened “extremist forces,” dead set on “liquidating the Soviet Union.” The statement was read on Soviet TV, repeated on the hour.
Gorbachev, held captive at his dacha — staring across the Black Sea, to Turkey — could do nothing. It was Yeltsin who arrived at the White House, the seat of the Supreme Soviet of Russia, to denounce the coup and call for Gorbachev’s release.
Those weeks in August, 1991 were defined by “the beautiful simplicity of moral choice,” writes Arkady Ostrovsky1. Protesters poured onto the streets to face the tanks, journalists defied publication bans, and Yeltsin assumed the role of democrat-in-chief. The bulwark against this Stalinist coup occupied the White House and challenged the army and the KGB to remove them. Some 40,000 ordinary people guarded the symbol of a fledgling Russian democracy.
The footsoldiers of the coup made only a feeble attempt to dislodge them: On the rainy night of August 21, three were killed, dragged and crushed by the tank treads. That was enough to make the army lose its nerve. The tanks withdrew from the capital. Gorbachev raced back to Moscow. Cooler heads prevailed. The Russian people had decided to protect their democracy, and they won.
Two years and one month later, Yeltsin was outside the White House and looking in. It was his turn to send in the tanks.
Politics in this nascent Russia had been a mess. Yeltsin had been resoundingly elected president, and a popular referendum even endorsed his painful shock therapy. The Congress of People’s Deputies, last elected before the Soviet Union collapsed, was moving to impeach Yeltsin, and he was determined to strike first.
This fight began on the airwaves. A union of fascists and communists capitalized on their newfound freedom of speech to attack Yeltsin’s fire sale capitalism from all sides. Yeltsin’s advisors, supposed liberals, sat behind closed doors and lamented: “Where television is concerned, I’m an extremist,” one unnamed official said, per Kremlin meeting minutes. “We must maintain control. The indefatigable opposition must never be allowed a toehold.”
On September 21, 1993, Yeltsin himself appeared on TV: “Parliament has been seized by a group of persons…pushing Russia towards the abyss,” he said. To prevent anarchy, collapse, even nuclear war: “I must break this disastrous vicious circle.” He already knew the likely outcome of this standoff.
Yeltsin announced he was dissolving parliament and calling snap elections. He, legally and constitutionally, could not do this. So the Congress impeached Yeltsin and declared his vice president, Alexander Rutskoy, acting President of Russia.
As the democrats had two years prior, an army of nationalists, communists, and opposition figures filled the White House. They barricaded the doors with old furniture and donned whatever armor they could find. Rutskoy appointed one of the lead ‘91 coup-plotters as his minister of defense. What they did inside the building ultimately didn’t much matter. They knew that their struggle would be made or broken on television.
The rebels made a break for a nearby TV station. They intended to inform the Russian public that Yeltsin had become a usurper, and that he was forcing a corrupted form of democracy onto the nation. In a bloody fight for the station, the network simply went off the air. Yeltsin remained in control of the only channel that remained live.
“To ‘take’ the Kremlin you must ‘take’ television,” Yakovlev, the Soviet reformist, said a year later. But it was the Kremlin who had taken television. As Yeltsin wrote in his memoirs: “The Russia Channel, the only one that stayed on the air, saved Moscow and Russia.” The Kremlin called on the Yeltsin-loving public to man the barricades.
Yeltsin was about to make a fateful decision. He was no longer a challenge to the army, but the commander of it. One of the most prominent journalists who had defied the press gag was now his spin doctor. The liberal revolutionaries, reformists and intellectuals, were now the ones determined to undo any spirit of democratic reform.
“In contrast with the ‘reactionaries,” of the 1991 coup attempt, writes renowned Russian political scientist Dmitrii Furman, “the democrats were not concerned with spilling other peoples’ blood.”2 Yeltsin had also learned plenty from the PR disaster of two years prior, where half-drunk gray generals had tried to project confidence on TV — but they only showed how weak they were.
On October 3, Yeltsin ordered the military to open fire on the White House. The shelling was extraordinary. Regular Muscovites stopped to watch the absurd spectacle of tanks firing shells into the side of the massive buildings in the center of the city. A “Russian matinee,” a theater critic called it.
Much attention was paid to Yeltsin’s attack on the seat of Russia’s broken democracy at the time. Observers, Russian and foreign, rationalized it as a necessary step against a hostile vestige of the Soviet state. Others, though, warned that it had broken something more fundamental about the Russian state.
“The shelling of the White House obviated any further compromises by Yeltsin on the text of the new constitution,” Furman writes.
What’s more, it had been a test of the Russian state, military, and — perhaps most importantly — its TV networks. Yeltsin purged the state of opposition. Elections held later that year were a drubbing for Yeltsin’s allies, but they ratified his constitution anyway. He lost even worse two years after that.
None of this mattered much, because that fateful week in October had sealed Russia’s fate. “Yeltsin and his circle had only one path available to them,” Furman writes. “Not backward but forward, to the ever-stronger consolidation of power in the presidency.”
Their violent loss in 1993 had destroyed the opposition. “It had become obvious that, henceforth, the goal of the opposition would not be to achieve power, but rather to achieve ever-less-attainable seats in the impotent Duma and to exert ever-weaker pressure on the authorities,” Furman writes. Yeltsin’s presidential victories were almost certainly rigged. No matter, because his rival would never dispute the results. He would name a successor, Vladimir Putin, responsible for “continuing to hollow out ever more the content of democracy while maintaining its form.”
The attack on the White House had given rise to, what Furman calls, “imitation democracy.” It’s a state that is much easier to fall into than we choose to believe.
Last night, President Donald Trump sat in his own White House, took to television, and fired a shot at America’s democracy. If democracy’s defenders do not flood the airwaves and the streets with a real defense of it — an aggressive, sustained, serious manning of the ramparts — the United States risks sliding into the very same kind of imitation democracy.
This week, on a very special Bug-eyed and Shameless, I take stock of Trump’s fantasies of electoral fraud. It brings us to one incontrovertible, unassailable, unavoidable conclusion:
This bullshit must be fought at all costs.
At 9pm on Thursday, the wavering and weary visage of Donald Trump interrupted the regularly scheduled programming on CBS and Fox stations across the United States. Both networks had heeded the president’s demand that they air the speech live — NBC and ABC refused.
Trump began his prime-time address with his usual bloviating. In the Trump interregnum, he said, “we had transgender for everybody.” Now, “we are doing great.” Just look, “drug prices are coming down by 70%, 80%, and 90%.” Or take stock of his wars: “We won Venezuela…we are likewise winning big in Iran.” And so on.
Trump had seized control of the airwaves for something important, he swore. “Tonight, I’m announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence,” he said, “revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.”
As he spoke, a new page on the White House website went live. “Many people,” it reads, “have questioned whether it could actually be possible to electronically manipulate vote totals or change election results.”
At his podium, a hoarse Trump insisted these were no longer just questions. “China’s sinister election meddling” was real, and “the Deep State” had worked to “actively suppress and downplay information” about it.
“Raw intelligence obtained by the FBI in 2020, yet buried by rogue bureaucrats, stated that China’s activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden,” he went on, insisting this information had been withheld from his intelligence briefings while he was president.
He continued throwing out disparate threads — a CIA memo about Venezuela’s rigged election, details of Chinese efforts to obtain voter rolls, an anonymous complaint against a get-out-the-vote operation in Michigan — and declared “we can never watch a stolen election again.”
No longer can the television networks downplay this threat, he said, like the “fake news,” NBC and ABC. “They and others in the media are part of a plot.” They are guilty, Trump seethed, and “fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses.”
I sifted through those newly-declassified documents as Trump spoke.
The intelligence memos focus on three main themes: The Venezuelan government co-opting of British voting company Smartmatic — which works on American elections; Chinese hacking; and domestic voter fraud.
On Venezuela, the CIA certainly accepts that the Venezuelan government rigged its domestic elections, but dismisses the allegations against the UK company. “Smartmatic ceased operations in Venezuela [in 2018] after publicly accusing the Maduro regime of inflating voter turnout,” the memo notes. That is the sum total of evidence that Venezuela played a role in the 2020 U.S. election. (In fact, the CIA could not definitively say that “large-scale electronic fraud” was deployed in the Venezuelan elections at all. Low-tech rigging was a more likely culprit.)
The White House’s China files are more voluminous. They include high-level assessments from the Intelligence Community and more spot reports, which show that China may have obtained voter data — names, birth dates, mailing addresses, party affiliation — from 18 states. Another assessment concludes that Chinese hackers may have gained access to databases full of Americans’ personnel information.
The most alarming warning came from a single agency, which warned that “Beijing has taken at least some low-level, exploratory steps to undermine the president’s reelection chances by denigrating him and shaping voter perceptions.”
But the memos also reveal how minor this all is. Obtaining voter data is not difficult: 32 states allow anyone to purchase voter data, and it can be trivially easy to get. One memo even refers to this (supposedly) hacked data as “publicly available.” The databases of personal information obtained by China were readily available online, and had been for years. Nowhere is it claimed that China did anything with this data.
The memos reveal that Beijing “probably calculates that a concerted effort to [redacted] influence the Presidential election would [redacted] backfire and offer uncertain benefit.” The intelligence community, broadly, concluded: “China does not currently intend to covertly interfere to try to sway the outcome of the election.” But even that minority assessment found “there is no reporting to suggest that China has engaged in some of the most aggressive measures available to it to influence the US election outcome, such as…trying to compromise voting infrastructure or interfere with mail-in ballots.”
If China did want to meddle, the intelligence community wrote, Beijing would simply leak damaging information it had obtained against high-profile politicians.
The intelligence memos include plenty of other unverified allegations from random sources — of ballot harvesting, offering bribes to vote for Biden, and so on. These allegations were investigated and dismissed.
These hundreds of pages prove precisely nothing. But that is, I suppose, immaterial. As Trump made clear, he expects this pressure campaign to result in exactly one thing: The nationalization of elections.
“Congress must pass the SAVE America Act,” he declared. He gave the public homework: “Pick up your phone tomorrow, call your Representatives.”
No more open access to mail-in ballots, he said. Mandatory voter ID and proof of citizenship. “The only reason you wouldn’t do it is: You want to cheat.”
No attempted coup has been more litigated than Donald Trump’s efforts to overturn the 2020 election.
His dubious claims of interference and fraud have been repeatedly investigated, from within government and independent of it; those allegations, and many others, have been subject to a dizzying litany of civil claims; and those who have repeated these theories have faced criminal prosecution for their efforts.
Those paths — independent and collective assessments of the U.S. intelligence community; numerous FBI investigations; an inquiry from an arm’s-length Special Counsel; congressional studies; and a public airing of all the possible evidence — all lead to the incontrovertible fact that the 2020 election was not stolen, nor was it marred by any significant volume of fraud or interference. The one most responsible for trying to steal that election was, and is, Donald Trump. (Dispatches #04, #36, #66, #116)
The most succinct, though, is a declassified post-election bulletin from the National Intelligence Council. (An earlier, classified, and heavily-redacted version of this document was included in Thursday’s file dump.) The assessment makes five big conclusions. (Emphasis mine)
Key Judgment 1: We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results. We assess that it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate election processes at scale without detection by intelligence collection on the actors themselves, through physical and cyber security monitoring around voting systems across the country, or in post-election audits. The IC identified some successful compromises of state and local government networks prior to Election Day — as well as a higher volume of unsuccessful attempts — that we assess were not directed at altering election processes. Some foreign actors, such as Iran and Russia, spread false or inflated claims about alleged compromises of voting systems to undermine public confidence in election processes and results.
Key Judgment 2: We assess that Russian President Putin authorized, and a range of Russian government organizations conducted, influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy […]
Key Judgment 3: We assess that Iran carried out a multi-pronged covert influence campaign intended to undercut former President Trump’s reelection prospects […]
Key Judgment 4: We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election. We have high confidence in this judgment. China sought stability in its relationship with the United States, did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling, and assessed its traditional influence tools — primarily targeted economic measures and lobbying — would be sufficient to meet its goal of shaping US China policy regardless of the winner. The NIO for Cyber assesses, however, that China did take some steps to try to undermine former President Trump’s reelection.
Key Judgment 5: We assess that a range of additional foreign actors — including Lebanese Hizballah, Cuba, and Venezuela — took some steps to attempt to influence the election. In general, we assess that they were smaller in scale than the influence efforts conducted by other actors this election cycle. Cybercriminals disrupted some election preparations; we judge their activities probably were driven by financial motivations.
All of the documents released Thursday confirm the findings above. What’s more: These documents have already been released.
In August 2020, the U.S. intelligence community even stated publicly that “China prefers that President Trump – whom Beijing sees as unpredictable – does not win reelection.”
Days later, U.S. National Security Advisor Robert O’Brien went on national TV and said: “China — like Russia, like Iran — they’ve engaged in cyberattacks and phishing and that sort of thing with respect to our election infrastructure, with respect to websites and that sort of thing.”
Those actions have been well-known and well-documented. Nobody — not publicly, nor in these declassified documents — has alleged that China actually used its cyber capabilities to affect the outcome in any way.
Still, the U.S. government was serious about pursuing Chinese state-backed hackers. Four years after the election, while Joe Biden was president, the FBI and Department of Justice indicted seven hackers working for the Chinese government. The indictment directly alleges that the hacking group APT31 targeted “high-ranking U.S. government officials and politicians and election campaign staff from both major U.S. political parties.” (The alleged intrusions were more geared towards influence operations, not interference with election infrastructure.)
The most substantive claim that China actually tried to affect the vote totals comes from one report, made to the FBI Albany field office by a confidential source. The source alleged, based on third-hand information, that China used TikTok to harvest voter data so they could obtain fraudulent driver’s licenses in order to request mail-in ballots. The FBI concluded the allegation, which was accompanied by no evidence, was not credible — especially given that “address information was not a valid field when creating a TikTok account” — and dismissed it. This isn’t new: This document was published last year by Senator Chuck Grassley, to absolute crickets.
The claims that Venezuela could have — or did — clandestinely rig vote results have been amply tested in court. Trump’s loyal TV networks — Fox, Newsmax, LindellTV — all repeated the allegation. On Lou Dobbs’ Fox show, Rudy Giuliani (then Trump’s lawyer) claimed Smartmatic was founded “by Venezuelans who are close to, were close to Chávez, are now close to Maduro…in order to fix elections.”
Smartmatic sued. Those legal actions forced Newsmax into a $40 million settlement and a grovelling apology, after a court ruled that the allegation that Smartmatic “somehow altered or manipulated” results “are factually false/untrue.” Mike Lindell, the MyPillow guy, lost his case outright: “Smartmatic has never stolen any election, and its technology has never been used to manipulate ballots,” a judge found. Smartmatic’s case against Fox News and Giuliani continues, and is unlikely to end well for the network.
I could keep beating the horse, but I won’t. The 2020 U.S. presidential election wasn’t rigged or interfered with, and there is no credible case to say it was. This current effort is lazy, half-baked, and already debunked: There is no reason to take it seriously. It is, we know, a lie designed to provide cover for the odious SAVE America Act.
It is very unlikely that Congress will actually pass the Act outright. More likely, Speaker Mike Johnson will shove the legislation through a reconciliation bill. It is hard to overstate just how dangerous this could be.
“The SAVE America Act’s voter ID provisions, whether implemented as a mandate or as funding conditions, would require changes to voter ID laws in nearly every state in America,” reads a white paper from the Institute for Responsive Government. “As currently drafted, the bill provides no federal funding to overhaul state and county election systems and no transition period for such changes.”
What’s more, it would attack mail-in ballots, purge voter rolls, introduce new criminal penalties for election workers who make clerical errors in registering voters, and force states to hand over voter data.
This would cause “chaos,” the Brennan Center warns, blocking “millions” of American citizens from voting.
Last night, as Trump turned the screws, Republican Senator Thom Tillis vowed to stop the Act. “What we’re going to do if we continue down this path is to convince the American people that you can’t count on your election results,” he warned, “and that is dangerous.” Most of his colleagues, the ones up for re-election, have not been moved.
Trump and his apparatchiks aren’t stupid. They don’t want the American people to count on the election results. They don’t even want the American people to vote.
There is a full-court press from the Trumpist media to get this done. Fox has proclaimed that Trump’s “shocking” disclosures have pushed conservatives to “unite around SAVE America Act.” On the CBS Evening News last night, the network uncritically repeated the claim of “Chinese meddling” and of a deep state coverup. (After quoting a few critics, anchor Tony Dokoupil pivoted to a jokey aside about Trump’s teleprompter operator.)
Baseless as Trump’s claims may be, they continue to filter out to the public: Corroding trust and building the idea that there must be a there there. Vice President JD Vance went on the Joe Rogan Experience earlier this week, where he caked election denialism in a patina of intellectualism — suggesting mail-in ballots disenfranchised rural voters, implying it is inexplicable that mail-in ballots could skew liberal, and framing voter ID as a common sense no-brainer. “We are trying to make it a federal thing,” he acknowledged. He implied he was willing to blow up the filibuster to get it done.
At nearly the same time, Senator Jon Ossoff was interrogating Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to replace Tulsi Gabbard as Director of National Intelligence. “Who won the 2020 election?” Ossoff asked again, and again, and again. “I’m not going to get into that with you,” Clayton replied.
Consent is being manufactured for Republicans to drive this bill through. They know that the only way to guarantee a win in November’s midterms — and the presidential vote in 2028 — is to cheat.
The Trump administration wants to rig the election, because they know it only needs to happen once.
It is a simple fact of modern man that we don’t seem to know that democracy is gone until it’s gone. Even then, sometimes, we stay ignorant.
Russia’s fledgling democracy may have been considerably more fragile than where America finds herself now, but many of the variables are the same: The weaponization of popular media, the endemic cynicism, the rampant polarization, and the overwhelming desire for stability.
It is perhaps because Russia’s democracy was so new, and so hotly desired by the masses, that people came out so forcefully to defend it in 1991. Yeltsin became a global icon of liberalism because of his willingness to climb atop a putschist tank and declare that democracy could not be crushed.
But, as Furman wrote, “power’s tightening control over society also means a gradual atrophying of feedback from society.” The men who would oust Gorbachev had power but no control. Yeltsin, two years later, had both, and he learned the importance of exercising it. Furman describes that process: “The elections cease to offer a realistic picture of public sentiment. The media offer an increasingly distorted view that eventually bears no resemblance to reality at all. Criticism of the authorities in mass media becomes exceptionally rare.”
Trump’s SAVE America Act hopes to make elections less real. The continued subservience of Fox, the newfound loyalty of CBS, and the regulatory threats against NBC and ABC all portend a decline in critical coverage in the mass media. The illusion of legitimacy becomes so powerful that fewer and fewer bother to challenge it and “those in power begin to believe their own propaganda,” as Furman warns.
Joe Rogan offers a useful illustration.
“Oprah Winfrey was saying it: If we don’t win this election, you may never vote again,” he told Vance. “Like, what the fuck are you talking about?” He and Vance chuckled. “That’s right,” the vice president said.
But that’s not the risk. Voting still happens in an imitation democracy. The problem is: Voting no longer bears a relation to the outcome. Power has — by conjuring up threats and promising stability — broken the relationship between the people and democracy.
There is a time to stop this from happening, but it must occur early on. Once a democracy has been shelled, literally or figuratively, the mechanics of democracy can no longer save it. You can only suffer under it.
That’s it for this week!
This last-minute dispatch comes instead of something else I’ve been working on, which needs a bit more work.
For paid subscribers, here’s a rundown of some recent work and an update on some big things I’ve been working on:
Until next week!
The Invention of Russia: The Rise of Putin and the Age of Fake News, Arkady Ostrovsky. (2015)
Imitation Democracy: The Development of Russia’s Post-Soviet Political System. (2010)
Great dispatch. Looking forward to your new book!