President Donald Trump’s latest attack on American democracy relies on an old tactic. Throughout his second administration — and even dating back to his first — Trump appointees have laundered documents they claim prove Democratic and “deep state” malfeasance through credulous right-wing outlets, counting on MAGA media to amplify their conspiracy theories and hoping that mainstream outlets would pick them up as well. Now they’re applying the same playbook to election denial.

On Thursday night, Trump plans to use a White House address to relitigate his Big Lie that the 2020 election was stolen from him. While details are sparse, reports suggest he could use declassified intelligence documents to accuse China and Venezuela of election interference and target the 2020 Senate elections in Georgia. Allies in the election denial community have suggested such claims could be used as a "predicate" to declare a “national emergency” that would justify an executive order implementing voter suppression policies by fiat.

Right-wing journalist John Solomon and Trump crony Bill Pulte, recently installed by the president at the White House and as acting director of national intelligence, respectively, are reportedly leading the effort to scrounge up the documents Trump will use to make his case — and taking those records out of context to support his conspiracy theories (“They try to put bits and pieces together and then make these conclusions,” one administration official told MS NOW).

Such duplicitous methods are necessary because the 2020 election’s security has been litigated over and over again, with the intelligence community under Trump’s auspices finding “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect” of the voting process and the attorney general he appointed, William Barr, stating in December 2020 that “we have not seen fraud on a scale that could have effected a different outcome in the election.” But MAGA hacks like Benny Johnson and Steve Bannon are already frothing at the mouth over the speech, promising that it will bring about “doomsday for the deep state” and “change the direction of politics.”

The salvo Trump and his administration are telegraphing is incredibly dangerous — but it is simply the election denial version of what they’ve previously tried to do to delegitimize the federal probes of Russian interference in the 2016 election, Trump’s retention of classified documents, and his role in the January 6 insurrection, among other cases. I previously described this tactic as the Trump administration’s "chum cycle":

The Trump administration chums the waters by handing over documents related to one of the myriad past investigations into the president’s actions; the president, top Trump officials, and Republican officeholders say they show a massive scandal; and mainstream reporters point out their narrative is farcical while MAGA media stars call for the indictment, arrest, prosecution, jailing, and perhaps execution of their political enemies.

Amid one such campaign, which targeted former President Barack Obama, The New York Times reported that “Trump hopes enough information will be released by his intelligence appointees to muddy the waters and lend a patina of confusion about what Mr. Obama may have done, according to people familiar with his thinking.” Trump has tried to stock his administration with officials who will employ the same tactic to the same ends.

The innovation this time around seems to be that Trump is using a primetime White House address to detail the allegations, rather than merely using his social media platform or a Fox interview to accuse his enemies of crimes or misconduct.

The right used a “chum cycle” to muddy Russia, January 6, and classified documents probes