How Trump Uses A 'Chum Cycle' To Promote Conspiracies And Attack Democracy
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
All of these were once treated as huge bombshells in MAGA media, but quickly faded from prominence once their central premises proved faulty.
- Probable cause for the Mar-A-Lago raid. In December, Fox News Digital reported that “the FBI did not believe it had probable cause to raid President Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago home in 2022, but moved forward amid pressure from the Biden Justice Department,” citing “newly declassified documents.” Trump administration officials amplified the story and MAGA pundits called it a “massive” “bombshell” that should lead to “charges and arrests.” But the Trumpist spin was nonsense: The FBI concerns detailed in the documents predated the acquisition of Mar-a-Lago surveillance video showing “Trump aides secretly removing boxes of records,” which convinced the bureau’s leaders that probable cause had been reached.
- The January 6 toll records. In October, Fox News Digital reported that “former Special Counsel Jack Smith was allegedly tracking the private communications and phone calls of nearly a dozen Republican Senators as part of his investigation into the Jan. 6, 2021, Capitol riots,” citing a document “recently discovered by FBI Director Kash Patel and exclusively obtained by Fox News Digital.” GOP senators expressed outrage over the conduct, while pundits on Fox and Newsmax called it “authoritarianism” and suggested Smith was “going to go to jail.” In reality, the FBI had reviewed the toll records of senators in order to establish who Trump and his alleged co-conspirators were trying to contact before and during the January 6 insurrection.
- The “Clinton Plan.” In late July 2025, The New York Post reported that a newly declassified annex to special counsel John Durham’s report on the origins of the Russia probe supposedly unveiled a “plot” in which Hillary Clinton’s campaign manufactured evidence to smear Trump for colluding with Russia. MAGA pundits described this as “a coordinated criminal cover-up to protect Clinton” and said she “should be behind bars” for it. In fact, Durham reportedly assessed these emails were forgeries “likely made by Russian spies.”
- Obama’s “treasonous conspiracy.” Earlier that month, former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard declassified and provided to Fox documents she claimed proved “a treasonous conspiracy in 2016 committed by officials at the highest level of our government” which aimed “to subvert the will of the American people and enact what was essentially a years-long coup.” She called for the prosecutions of figures including Barack Obama; as MAGA media figures chimed in and suggested Obama and others face charges of “treason,” Trump posted to Truth Social an AI video featuring Obama being arrested and imprisoned.What the documents actually show is that Obama received an intelligence report that Russia had not hacked election systems to change vote totals in the 2016 election (which the Obama administration said publicly at the time), then asked for another intelligence report detailing other actions taken by the Russian government in an effort to influence the election. The intelligence community — and subsequently the Justice Department and a Senate committee helmed by current Secretary of State Marco Rubio — concluded that this was a multifarious effort which included the hacking and release of Democratic emails.
- The “unmasking” charade. In May 2020, during the first Trump administration, then-Acting Director of National Intelligence Richard Grenell produced a list of senior Obama administration officials who had received Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn’s name after asking the National Security Agency to reveal through the standard process of “unmasking” the identity of an individual generically referenced in an NSA report. Fox hosts described this as “the biggest abuse of power scandal in American history” and called for the officials to be charged with “felonies.” Trump himself said on the network that the “Obamagate” plot was “the greatest political crime in the history of the United States,” and then-DOJ spokesperson Kerri Kupec — now Fox’s legal editor and VP — confirmed in a Fox interview that Barr had appointed then-U.S. Attorney John Bash to review the case.There was never any evidence that the unmaskings were improper, and Bash closed his investigation five months later, filing no charges. Nearly two years after that, Buzzfeed published Bash’s final report to Barr, in which he stated that the senior Obama officials had not unmasked Flynn “for political purposes or other inappropriate reasons” and that “all but one of the requests that listed a senior official as an authorized recipient of General Flynn’s identity were made by an intelligence professional to prepare for a briefing of the official, not at the direction of the official.”
It’s unclear whether the Trump administration officials furiously trying to generate these scandals are deliberately lying about the contents of the documents they declassify, or if they are themselves so steeped in MAGA media conspiracy theories that they are predisposed to run with the most deranged and purportedly damning interpretations of otherwise innocuous records (Gabbard, Grenell, and Patel all had right-wing media careers of their own before joining the federal government).
What’s clear is that the “chum cycle” tactic relies on the credulousness of right-wing media to launder the documents, run with the administration’s overwrought claims, and saturate the MAGA base’s news environment with furious denunciations and calls for retribution.
And when you combine that Trumpist propaganda apparatus with a Trump administration shorn of guardrails and a MAGA base predisposed to believe that the president is so popular that only fraud can explain Republican defeats — and then use Trump himself to apply the tactic to election denial — the potential for disaster becomes explosive.
Reprinted with permission from Media Matters
