David Frum

And it was just a wild series of mutually contradictory, but always the same answer, but never the same explanation.

Let's bring this forward to the present because the reason all of this is suddenly so very, very urgent is not just that we've had this ever-continuing claim by Donald Trump where he says things like, I won the state of Minnesota three times when he won it no times.

And you might think, OK, well, he's just a deluded old man who happens to be president.

And that's probably not even the most harmful, untrue thing he believes.

He is president now.

No one doubts that.

And he wasn't president for the four years after the election he lost.

And that's history.

But right now, the president and his supporters, including the director of national intelligence, are engaged in an attack on the voting system in Georgia in 2026 with an eye to what looks like some scheme to distort or twist the elections that are expected in November of this year.

You have written about what you think may be going on.

What's going on?

Well, one thing that you hear said that they may be thinking of is in the wilder precincts of election denialism in 2020 and 2021, there was a fantasy that the government of Venezuela, not a known technological leader, but that somehow had magic technology, which allowed it to change the outcome of votes in the United States.

And now there's been the Trump invasion of Venezuela or the raid into Venezuela, which a lot of us hoped would be some effort to restore Venezuelan democracy.

But no, it's just a kidnapping of one of the thugs who runs Venezuela, leaving all the other thugs intact.

But the election aspect is some people speculate that what Trump has in mind is take Nicolas Maduro, former dictator, put him in front of an American court and say, have the prosecutors who are

the ones who have not resigned because they have integrity, but the ones who remain who don't, have them say, dictator Maduro, you can either spend the rest of your life in an American jail or we can let you go if you just affirm this crazy idea we have that magic Venezuelan technology changed the results in 2020.

Does any of that sound like something that could happen?

Yeah.

Well, Trump let out the former president of Honduras, who's one of the biggest drug dealers in the world.

That wasn't about the election.