Trump appears to link Iran attack to his 2020 election loss

Original article by Aram Roston in Washington

Donald Trump on Saturday appeared to link the massive attack he ordered against Iran to his persistent claims about his 2020 election loss to former president Joe Biden, in a social media post about allegations that Tehran’s government interfered in the US president elections.

“Iran tried to interfere in 2020, 2024 elections to stop Trump,” his Truth Social post said, “and now faces renewed war with United States”.

Those words, written in the first hours of the bombardment of Iran, repeated the headline of an article to which he linked from Just the News, a Trump-friendly news site. “Iranian intelligence sought to undermine Trump’s re-election bid in 2020 through a variety of election influence efforts,” the article said. It also said Iran worked against him in 2024, when he beat Kamala Harris at the polls.

This is the second military operation of the Trump administration where he alluded to allegations concerning the 2020 election. He made similar comments on social media in January, days after Trump ordered the Delta Force “rendition” of Venezuela’s president Nicolás Maduro. Trump reposted links that repeated discredited conspiracy allegations that Venezuela interfered in the 2020 election by controlling voting machines.

Previously, he had hinted at support for those theories in a post, linking to a podcast about the Venezuela theory and writing: “We must focus all of our energy and might on ELECTION FRAUD!!” As the Guardian reported in November the Trump justice department began investigating the long discredited Venezuela theory last year.

The White House did not respond to requests for comment for this story.

While a central tenet of the Maga movement’s America First doctrine is an aversion to foreign wars, another core Maga obsession has been to dig into Trump’s election grievances.

Where the Venezuela allegations have not been seen as credible by experts, Iran has indeed been accused of election interference, including by mainstream Biden era officials.

In August of 2024, in the heat of the presidential campaign, officials said Iran was responsible for hacking internal Trump campaign records which appeared to have been sent to journalists. One document included research on JD Vance. The FBI, the ODNI and CISA wrote that Iran had done the hack “to compromise former President Trump’s campaign”, and said the intelligence community “is confident that the Iranians have through social engineering and other efforts sought access to individuals with direct access to the presidential campaigns of both political parties”.

Three alleged Iranian hackers were later indicted.

It is also true that in 2020 officials said Iran was behind a strange hoax email incident where Democratic-registered voters received threatening emails telling them to vote for Trump. The emails were crudely faked to seem like they came from the Proud Boys far-right group but were then traced to Iran.

In spite of that, there is no known evidence that Iran really played a key role in Trump’s 2020 election loss. But among believers, Iran is also a player in some of the more outlandish conspiracy theories. A recent book called Stolen Elections, which repeated the Venezuela allegations, listed Iran among the countries that purportedly help Venezuela remotely rig elections. “Iran,” the book said, “provides technical advice and computer engineers”.