Is Trump getting his 2020 revenge against a country MAGA believes is rigging elections?

Bogus conspiracy theories that Donald Trump and Trump-aligned figures dreamed up to explain his loss in the 2020 presidential election are still consuming the president and fanatical supporters who make up his base.

Trump keeps injecting them into his attempts at diplomacy. They animate actual White House policy. And they’re now tangled up in his administration’s arrest of Venezuelan leader Nicolas Maduro.

In the days after the 2020 election, Trump-connected figures floated a debunked conspiracy theory that election technology firms Dominion Voting Systems and Smartmatic were designed to rig Venezuelan elections and then deployed to the United States to manipulate results to put Joe Biden in office.

After U.S. forces captured Maduro, right-wing influencers dragged the idea back to their timelines. Trump, a prolific right-wing social media influencer himself, shared a post claiming that the CIA outsourced those companies to rig the election against him.

Trump routinely used the political and economic crisis in Venezuela for his own political ambitions, but it now appears he can’t resist feeding off long-dead conspiracy theories and the influencers promoting them to keep his bogus “stolen election” narrative alive. And officials in his administration are running with it.

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A senior Department of Justice official shared a post on X suggesting Maduro might try “to plead to lesser charges by proffering evidence that the 2020 election was stolen.”

Trump shared a post on Truth Social this week suggesting it wasn’t a “coincidence” that he had been promoting claims “about Dominion voting machine fraud” after Maduro’s capture.

“There’s a reason President Trump is flooding the internet with election theft videos now,” wrote pro-Trump influencer Chad Vivas, who is known online as KagDrogo. He claimed “Maduro is an informant against the CIA for laundering election theft technology like Smartmatic and Dominion through Venezuela.”

“Trump has it all,” he wrote. “Retribution is coming.”

Right-wing influencer Benny Johnson also claimed that “Maduro might be Trump’s final revenge for the election theft of 2020.”

Maduro “knows where all the bodies are buried,” he said.

“This is why you see the globalists around the world bricking in their pants,” according to Johnson. “They’re terrified because Venezuela was ground zero for election theft.”

Last year, Dominion was purchased by a firm run by a former Republican election official and renamed Liberty Vote. That development, plus Maduro’s capture and Trump’s embrace of conspiracy theories, is apparent proof that “the dominoes are being lined up” to prove Trump’s victory in 2020, according to right-wing commentator Rogan O’Handley.

“It’s about Venezuela being the base of election fraud,” added noted conspiracy theorist Alex Jones.

“Folks, when this house of cards starts falling perfectly this year, the 250th anniversary of this country, what a present,” Jones said. “And Trump intends all of this to be going and done by July 4th.”

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The conspiracy theories bubbled into Trumpworld in the aftermath of the 2020 election, when his supporters alleged that Dominion machines — which were also used in states that Trump won in 2016 — had somehow worked with a long-dead Venezuelan leader to rig the outcome.

Then-Trump attorney Rudy Giuliani claimed during an infamous press conference that Dominion is an “ally of Hugo Chavez, is an ally of Nicolas Maduro, and an ally of George Soros.”

While an unidentified brown liquid slid down his face, Giuliani claimed American ballots were being counted “by a Venezuelan company” that is “owned by people who are allies of Maduro and Chavez.”

Attorney Sidney Powell also claimed the companies “were created in Venezuela at the direction of Hugo Chavez to make sure he never lost an election after one constitutional referendum came out the way he did not want it to come out.”

Those claims, which made their way to right-wing news networks, were also at the center of an avalanche of defamation lawsuits filed by the companies, which are not related to one another nor affiliated with any government.

Smartmatic, which is based in London with Venezuelan founders, pulled out of the country in 2017 after alleging Maduro’s regime manipulated election results. Fox News ultimately reached a record-setting settlement with Dominion after accusing the network of spreading false statements about its business.

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Still, conspiracy theories persisted online and in a right-wing media ecosystem thriving on the narrative.

In October, Patrick Byrne, the former Overstock CEO who amplified bogus claims that Venezuelan tech was being used to defraud elections, claimed on Mike Lindell’s network that “there’s never been as necessary a war since the Civil War that we go down and take care of Venezuela.”

“It’s more important than World War I and World War II to the viability of the United States,” he said. “The U.S. was overthrown, and Venezuela’s technology was part of it.”

A month later, U.S. attorney for Puerto Rico Stephen Muldrow was allegedly briefed on the long-running conspiracy theory, kickstarting Justice Department investigations into Venezuela’s elections.

Trump shared a post about those revived allegations, adding that “we must focus all of our energy and might on ELECTION FRAUD!!”