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Culture War Roundup for the week of September 15, 2025

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"The left successfully manipulated the information environment such that Americans voted the wrong way" is not grounds for overturning an election. As a matter of law and public opinion, the appropriate response would be "Sucks to suck. Git gud."

The weird decision was going after the voting machines first rather than running with the plausible lies about mass postal vote fraud from day one. In general, until Eastman takes over from Giuliani and Sidney Powell in early December, Trump's effort to overturn the election was pretty shambolic - particularly given that it had clearly been pre-planned.

In normal times or if law remotely mattered, Giuliani's election contests would have stopped the counting and mixing of ballots and would have been successful in multiple states, definitely in Georgia. Giuliani wasn't the one pushing voting machines and was actually one of the people telling Trump to ghost Sideny Powell pretty early on.

No decision was made to focus on machines and machines weren't the focus of the campaign. Even a slight glance at any of the filed election contests should cure you of that claim, especially attempting to claim it was "clearly pre-planned."

The machine claims focus was something which developed post-hoc for a variety of reasons, but mainly because it was the one the media could pick up because its proponents, e.g., Sidney Powell, were increasingly deranged and their at least some of their claims were terrible and it could easily be made into a nonsense caricature. The areas which would have borne more fruit, e.g., signature checks and voter mail fraud, were meeting significant resistance in what was ostensibly Trump's own side.

The entirety of the GOP election game was unserious and clownish for various reasons, but that's hardly new. Any lawyer even remotely connected to GOP politics were getting many phone calls trying to scramble people into areas which should have already had pre-planned contests ready to go. Even among GOP "lawyers," few were willing to work for the Trump campaign in 2020 for a variety of reasons.

Although Giuliani was responsible for Four Seasons Total Landscaping, which was the most visibly shambolic moment of the whole affair.

okay, so then what?

nothing little in your post is remotely accurate with respect to the 2020 post-election campaign; it's just post-hoc narrative formation cherry picking anecdotes you read in friendly media

claiming the machines fraud narrative was "pre-planned" or "the weird decision was going after voting machines first" is just entirely detached from reality

"The left successfully manipulated the information environment such that Americans voted the wrong way" is not grounds for overturning an election.

Even if they used government force to do so?

Legally, definitely not. Politically, I don't think that type of attack has ever worked to undermine the legitimacy of an election anywhere, and it has been tried a lot.

The US is one of the few countries where there is no legal process to overturn an election on grounds other than the casting and counting of the votes. But in countries where there are other grounds to overturn an election, they look like "The candidate or his designated campaign team committed one of a short list of specified offences" - most commonly exceeding spending limits or knowingly accepting illegal foreign assistance. The idea of overturning an election based on some third party being biased in a way which it is not itself illegal is batshit - particularly if it is the incumbent claiming his own government was biased against him. But in any case using a legal technicality to overturn an election makes you look like a sore loser and typically causes you to lose the rerun election in a landslide.

Legally, definitely not. Politically, I don't think that type of attack has ever worked to undermine the legitimacy of an election anywhere, and it has been tried a lot.

In Romania, it was enough that a non-incumbent had a TikTok account. But it should be no surprise that the same government that "manipulated the information environment" would not accept that this invalidated an election.

As I said, legal processes to invalidate elections involve specific election offences committed by the candidate or campaign. In the case of Georgescu, it was (assuming that the documents released by the government were genuine) an absolutely blatant campaign finance violation - a million euros was spent on paid promotion of the TikTok account while Georgescu was claiming to have received zero campaign donations.