Wednesday brought news that, once again, multiple hostile nations are attempting to influence a U.S. presidential election. The Department of Justice indicted two employees of R.T., Russia’s state broadcaster, who are accused of paying $10 million to a Tennessee-based network of “heterodox” YouTube influencers to “pump pro-Russia propaganda and disinformation across social media to U.S. audiences,” in the words of Deputy Attorney General Lisa Monaco. (Some journalists have deduced that the unnamed network is Tenet Media, which features right-wing blowhards such as Dave Rubin, Benny Johnson, Tim Pool, and Lauren Southern.) Meanwhile, The New York Times reported that Iran has created several fake but legitimate-seeming news websites aimed at tilting the race in Kamala Harris’s favor.
But Iran and Russia might not be the biggest sources of misinformation in the 2024 election. A month ago, the nonprofit Center for Countering Digital Hate, or CCDH, reported that false statements posted or reposted by Elon Musk on X—the social media platform that he has been slowly ruining since purchasing it two years ago—have been viewed a staggering 1.2 billion times. And Musk has only grown more brazen since that report was released. Over the weekend, he posted an A.I.-generated image of Kamala Harris wearing a red pantsuit and hat emblazoned with the hammer and sickle. “Kamala vows to be a communist dictator on day one. Can you believe she wears that outfit!?” he tweeted. The post has been viewed more than 80 million times.
The fact that one of the world’s wealthiest people is using one of its largest social networks to spread lies to help Trump is obviously bad. And yet, there is a silver lining of sorts. Yes, Musk’s blatant propaganda has received more than a billion views, but it has also largely been inept—and there’s no evidence that anyone beyond his MAGA-pilled followers is buying it.
The threat is real. Musk may have reneged on a reported pledge to donate $45 million a month to Trump, but he has made clear that he intends to use his influence to elect Trump, whom he prefers for a host of policy and cultural reasons. He’s attempting to do so largely via dubiously sourced claims, outright lies, and pitiful attempts at humor on X, proving fears that he would turn the social network into a fever swamp of reactionary social and economic ideas are well founded. “What Musk is doing is creating a sort of Colosseum-style spectacle of encouraging, amplifying and himself spreading disinformation,” Imran Ahmed, the CEO of CCDH, told NBC News last month.
For example, in late July, Musk posted an A.I.-generated advertisement with a voiceover in which a fake Harris said she was a “diversity hire” who doesn’t know “the first thing about running the country.” Both this video and the image of Harris in “communist” garb violated X’s policy on manipulated content; neither received a “community note,” in which the social network’s users fact-check false posts.
Though malicious, and certainly cause for concern, such efforts reflect the pro-Trump camp’s larger struggle to define—more specifically, to tarnish—Harris among undecided voters. In early July, before Harris became the Democrats’ presumptive nominee, her unfavorability rating was through the roof—17 percent more voters disapproved of her than approved. That number currently sits at 0.4 percent, a shocking reversal.
Musk’s attacks on Harris have largely focused on three areas: her competence (and, relatedly, the fact that she became the Democratic nominee without competing in a primary); her supposed radicalism (see above); and her immigration platform (which doesn’t really exist). His attempts have been histrionic, pathetic, and ineffective. An A.I.-generated image of Harris wearing Communist-ish clothing is hardly a brutal attack. It’s barely even an advertisement for Musk’s bespoke A.I. tool “Grok,” which generated it. Instead, it suggests a desperate attempt to label a candidate running a middle-of-the-road campaign as some kind of dictator in waiting—there’s no sign that anyone is buying it.
Harris’s joyful campaign—the theme of which is “Freedom”—hardly comports with the caricature being put forth by Musk. To the extent that there are criticisms of it, they are that Harris hasn’t done enough to break with Biden’s conservative immigration policy and embrace of Israel. Musk’s criticisms of her immigration policy are in many ways more disgusting. Arguing that Harris and other Democrats are welcoming undocumented immigrants to win their votes—which is both a wild lie and logically absurd, since noncitizens can’t vote—echoes the racist “great replacement theory.” But Musk’s attacks are so outlandish that they can only be expected to resonate with other adherents to this theory.
Musk’s efforts to attack Harris’s qualifications and competence are more closely aligned with the approach taken by the Trump campaign. Trump has recently become obsessed with Harris’s claim that she worked at McDonald’s, alleging that it’s made up. (McDonald’s doesn’t keep records from Harris’s time there, which was 40 years ago.) The idea seems to be that Harris is a big phony who’s lying about her work experience in a shameless effort to appeal to normal voters. But this also feels overdetermined, an effort to undermine a claim that resonates politically. Harris’s campaign portrays her and her running mate, former teacher and current Minnesota Governor Tim Walz, as normal people who understand normal people’s problems—as opposed to the “weird” Trump and Vance. It’s working—hence the desperate attacks.
As the election nears and Trump’s (and Musk’s) desperation grows, these attacks will likely grow more frequent, hostile, and disgusting. The question is whether they will gain any purchase in the media and among undecided voters.
In 2016, Trump succeeded in muddying the waters, but only thanks to genuine controversy: His efforts to portray Clinton as sinister, secretive, and corrupt were aided by the reemergence of the FBI’s investigation of her use of a private email server in the final days of the campaign. Four years later, he launched similar attacks against Joe Biden based on material found on a laptop belonging to Biden’s son, Hunter. Those efforts largely failed.
Why did they fail? One argument is that the media, sensing a foreign influence campaign, largely didn’t cover the material on that laptop. But there’s another compelling explanation. Whereas the attacks on Clinton played into a narrative the right wing had been pushing for more than 30 years, with Biden they were making up a new narrative on the spot. The audience had not been primed to believe it, and the notion that Biden was involved in a massive, corrupt conspiracy wasn’t compelling to boot.
Rest assured, though, that Trump and Musk will keep trying. They’re thick as thieves, and suffer equally from main character syndrome. They both have a bottomless need for attention, and default to flooding the zone in attacking their rivals. For now, they are both floundering in doing so against Harris. It’s quite possible or even likely, though, that she will face some version of the Hunter Biden laptop story in the final weeks of the election—a right-wing pseudo-scandal aimed at taking over the news cycle and taking down her campaign. But the right’s failure to create a damaging narrative about her thus far suggests that this too will fall flat on its face. One billion views may seem like a lot, but not when it’s a tale told by an idiot.
