Venezuela Chaos

Disinformation Peddlers Use Venezuela Chaos to Stoke Fears of Anti-Trump Vote-Rigging

Believe it or not, MAGA has turned against a president accused of stealing an election.

Anna Merlan

The aftermath of Sunday’s elections in Venezuela has been sustained chaos, with both incumbent President Nicolás Maduro and his opponent Edmundo González Urrutia declaring victory. Masses of protesters have poured into the streets, calling on Maduro to step down. Hundreds have been arrested; some have been killed.

In the United States, pro-Trump disinformation peddlers seized the opportunity to darkly warn that similar chaos and authoritarianism would befall the United States if their candidate loses in November. It’s a topsy-turvy bit of discourse that has political figures who aren’t bothered by Trump’s attempts to stay in office after losing taking sides against another leader who they argue is doing the same thing.

Prominent disinformation peddlers declared that the US under Biden is also in the grip of an authoritarian leader.

Venezuela’s recent voting was marred by allegations of impropriety by Maduro’s United Socialist Party, who have become crushingly unpopular over his 11-year reign, as inflation has soared, social programs gone bankrupt, and millions of people fled. This week wasn’t the first time forces supporting Maduro have been accused of election interference, and obvious attempts at voter suppression were on display in the lead-up to this election, as critics warned international election observers were being kept from monitoring voting.

But when Maduro quickly declared an improbable victory on Sunday night—with choreographed fireworks streaking Caracas’ skies—prominent conspiracy theorists and disinformation peddlers in the US sensed a moment of possibility; they declared that the United States under Biden is, too, in the grip of an authoritarian leader, and shared scenes of unrest from Venezuela as a prequel to what could happen here if Trump is, in his supporters’ minds, unjustly denied the White House a second time. 

Infowars was among the first to jump on the emerging narrative, declaring in a headline on Monday, “Venezuelan Election Nightmare Foreshadows What’s Coming to America!” The site also declared that Venezuela “may soon break down into civil war,” adding that “globalists” were “pushing USA towards [the] same fate.” The article, as was often the case in the right-wingers’ Venezuela conceit, managed to ignore that it is the right-leaning sector of US politics that is home to calls for civil war if their candidate loses.

Elon Musk also speedily got aboard, sharing a tweet from a MAGA account that declared, “The United States will become Venezuela if Trump is not elected,” and was greeted with replies from the former president’s fans suggesting the US had, in denying Trump the White House in 2020, already gone well down the path to becoming a banana republic. Elsewhere on X, smaller accounts than Musk’s fretted about the Venezuela-ification of America; on Sunday night, an account called Diligent Denizen with 45,000 followers, which claims to cover breaking news, convened a Twitter space that drew about 1,000 listeners at its height. The conversation was explicitly devoted to drawing parallels between Venezuela and the US. “We’re all on edge,” one speaker declared, referring to their shared fears that the election would again be snatched away from Trump. “We don’t want the same thing happening to us that’s happening in Venezuela and that happened here in 2020.”

Mike Adams of the far-right conspiratorial site Natural News also got onboard, posting a broadcast on Brighteon in which he approvingly reported on the protests in Venezuela attempting to dislodge Maduro before declaring, “We had a stolen election in 2020. And the Democrats had no interest in checking that out. In fact, they shut down anybody who questioned that.”

Former Trump official turned podcaster Sebastian Gorka took a similar line, posting a video interview on Rumble with Joseph Humire of the right-wing Center for a Secure Free Society, where they agreed, as Gorka put it, that if Maduro’s attempts to stay in office go unchallenged, “everybody will try it.” Another Rumble account with 40,000 followers, a podcast called ScrewBigGov, was even more blatant, with a video pontificating about whether anti-Trump forces will steal November’s election, with a discussion titled “Venezuela: Could It Happen Here?” (Yes, the hosts concluded: “Do we think for a single second this can’t happen here in November?” one asked. “I think they’ve already got it nailed,” the other agreed.) 

Across Telegram, QAnon-promoting figures like Jordan Sather and New Age conspiracy theorists like David Avocado Wolfe—who both have large audiences in their respective corners of the conspiracy-verse—celebrated the protests as signs of a brave populace rising up against a tyrannical government. But, Sather fretted, “Hoping this revolution in Venezuela isn’t CIA-backed just to install a new globalist puppet.” 

Interestingly, Sather was accidentally crossing streams with another emerging and unproven notion that was more prevalent on the left: the claim that the protests in Venezuela are covertly backed by the US government or Western forces. Of course, the United States has a long history of meddling in Latin America politics and did secretly finance coups and regime changes there and elsewhere throughout the 20th century, and some commentators and news sites have pushed suggestions it is happening again. Alan MacLeod of the site MintPress News, a Minneapolis-based outlet that often runs pieces broadly critical of US policy, tweeted on Monday, “There is an attempted coup d’etat underway here in Venezuela, as the US-backed opposition is trying to overturn yesterday’s election results.” (MintPress has a record of reporting sympathetic to the repressive governments of Iran, Russia, and Syria, and the site was a major node for disinformation about the White Helmets, a volunteer civil defense and disaster-relief organization that operates in Syria and Turkey. Bellingcat has reported that MintPress and some of its main personalities were awarded a monetary prize in 2019 by a pro-Assad lobbying group.)

Some of the entities claiming the US had rigged opposition to Maduro’s election—and ignoring both Venezuela’s deepening economic and social crisis and his growing unpopularity—have political reasons to do so. Fiorella Isabel, a journalist for the Russian government–backed news outlet RT America, for instance, tweeted, “None of this is spontaneous. This attempted coup is a common pattern of US-backed opposition forces that have been working to make Venezuela a colony of Washington, & have punished it for resisting & demanding its national sovereignty.” The network also brought an election observer from South Africa on air who claimed the elections “were run transparently and democratically.” (Russian officials were excited after Maduro’s claimed victory, with Vladimir Putin sending him a warm message boasting of their countries’ “strategic partnership.”)

In one way, the chaotic discourse is indeed a likely preview for November in the United States, where a bitter, deeply divisive election will be fought—both at the ballot box and in an online environment studded with hucksters, scammers, and grifters, and suffused with bad-faith or incomplete information. The fact that far-right disinformation peddlers so deeply identify with Venezuela’s democratic collapse is its own serious warning.