The Georgia Trump Trial Will Be, Above All, the Final War Between Two Kinds of Baby Boomers on the Internet

Among the many alleged co-conspirators accused in Fulton County, Georgia, last week of helping Donald Trump attempt to overturn the 2020 election, two stand out: Rudy Giuliani and Sidney Powell.

Both are attorneys who were once competent and reasonably well respected. Both urged Trump to continue “fighting” to remain in office even as his other allies were abandoning that possibility—arguably making them the two people, besides Trump himself, without whom Jan. 6 wouldn’t have taken place. And they are both members of the baby boom generation who exemplify its disproportionate willingness to read and share completely made-up things on the internet.

By mid-December 2020, most figures in the Republican Party, and even within Trump’s own campaign and administration, had accepted the results of the November election. Then–attorney general William Barr told an Associated Press reporter on Dec. 1 that the Department of Justice had not found evidence of widespread voter fraud. On Dec. 15, Senate minority leader Mitch McConnell signaled his position by congratulating Joe Biden on becoming the next president. According to testimony given to the House’s Jan. 6 committee, Trump’s campaign managers, campaign lawyers, and White House lawyers all told him at various points that the allegations on which he was basing his contention that the election was “rigged” against him could not be substantiated and/or were “bullshit” (Barr’s phrasing, according to his testimony).

Giuliani and Powell did not agree with that assessment. They could not get enough of the bullshit. More bullshit, they said! Let’s bring it all to the Supreme Court!

Giuliani had endorsed Trump during the 2016 primary, then served in a kind of loose lawyer/fixer role for him during his first term, most notably by attempting to persuade the Ukrainian government to announce a corruption investigation into Hunter and Joe Biden. Powell became part of Trump’s orbit because he liked her appearances on Lou Dobbs’ Fox Business talk show; she represented former national security adviser Michael Flynn while he was being prosecuted for lying to the FBI about his interactions with Russia’s ambassador to the U.S.

After the 2020 election, Giuliani and Powell helped launch a legal and political campaign on Trump’s behalf that was independent of the work being done by the lawyers for his 2020 campaign and the White House counsel’s office. While Trump’s campaign attorneys generally challenged the validity of state-level voting results and election procedures without alleging fraud, Giuliani and Powell conducted a parallel effort in imaginaryland.

Most prominently, they were two main speakers at an instantly legendary Nov. 18 press conference during which a black streak began to leak down the side of Giuliani’s face while Powell alleged that the voting machine company Dominion, along with the late Venezuelan leader Hugo Chávez and the government of Cuba, had collaborated to rig ballot counts in Biden’s favor using a sinister “algorithm.” Giuliani said, at the same press conference, that he could “smell” crime but that so much of it had taken place during the election that he didn’t even need his sense of smell to prove it.

Their detective work didn’t end there. Giuliani toured the country to meet with Republican legislators in swing states that Biden had won, hoping to persuade them to invalidate results. In Michigan, he said voting data may have been routed (for purposes of fraud, obviously) through Frankfurt, Germany, and Barcelona, Spain. In Georgia, he claimed that two election workers in Atlanta had been caught on video handling “USB ports” that they were using to change votes. (He meant USB drives, but in any case was misidentifying what the workers in question say was actually a ginger mint.) He also introduced Georgia lawmakers to a lawyer who said she’d identified footage of “suitcases” stuffed with fake ballots being taken out from under a table at a vote-counting center. (They were normal crates filled with real ballots.)

Powell filed a lawsuit in Georgia that claimed, among other things, that Dominion was founded by “oligarchs and dictators” (it was founded in Canada by a guy working in his basement), that it has financial ties to China and Iran (no), that it was owned by another voting machine company called Smartmatic (no), and that it has an office in Germany (nein). On Dec. 18, she, Giuliani, Flynn, and—for some reason—the former CEO of Overstock.com were able to secure an unscheduled meeting with Trump at the White House at which they showed him “evidence” that Nest-brand thermostats had been used to hack election data. They also asked Trump to appoint Powell as a special counsel who would have the authority to order the military to seize voting machines, and called the White House attorneys “pussies” and quitters. Early the next morning, Trump sent a tweet urging his supporters to gather at the Capitol on Jan. 6. “Be there, will be wild!” it said.

Many of the claims presented by Giuliani and Powell in these endeavors filtered into circulation through the internet and the right-wing news networks that treat unverified online claims as factual information. Some of the ornate claims regarding Dominion, for example, appear to have originated on 8kun, the message board that also birthed the QAnon conspiracy theory. Other conspiracy theories were promoted by the far-right network OAN, which in its broadcasts takes unsubstantiated posts from message boards and social media accounts and describes them as “reports.” The notion of suspicious servers located in Germany and Spain appears to have begun on Twitter and was amplified on the Gateway Pundit site; claims about the Georgia “suitcases” and poll workers circulated on Instagram, Facebook, and Gateway Pundit and were discussed on right-wing cable networks, including OAN and Fox. Some of Powell’s claims, litigation pursued by Dominion later revealed, originated in an email that was sent to her directly by a woman in Minnesota who says she gathers information by speaking to dead people and the wind.

Giuliani and Powell were both familiar, at some point, with standards for what constitutes credible evidence—not just in public discourse but in court. Giuliani attended the New York University School of Law and was a successful federal prosecutor. Powell made local news in her native North Carolina for the speed with which she graduated from the University of North Carolina and its law school, and then she became a federal prosecutor herself. At one point, she was the president of the federal 5^th Circuit’s bar association.

They are also members of the demographic group that has been most disoriented by the rise of social media and unreliable (or completely fraudulent) news sources. Comedy writer Daniel Kibblesmith put it thus in a 2016 tweet that has only gained poignance with the passage of time:

(Reached by email, Kibblesmith wrote, “I don’t think of it as being especially prescient, because the reason it took off is that we were fully already there. The fact that I’m still getting notifications about a seven year old tweet does confirm that we haven’t begun addressing the problem at all.”)

Generation-wide stereotypes aren’t always based on robust, peer-reviewed data, but research supports this one. One academic study found that individuals 65 and older who used Twitter were twice as likely to see “fake news” from sites like Alex Jones’ InfoWars as those age 18 to 29, for example. Another found that individuals 65 and older shared seven times as many fake-news links as those 18 to 29. One explanation that’s been suggested for this phenomenon is the general susceptibility of older adults to memory problems; another is “digital illiteracy” created by the late adoption of computers and smartphones. (A wide majority of older Facebook users don’t realize that an algorithm customizes their feed for them; a third believe that posts are selected by “journalists and editors that work for Facebook.” If only, folks!) Other studies have found that conservative-skewing falsehoods online are more abundant than liberal ones and that individuals who lean conservative and have hostile feelings toward social and political institutions are more likely to share them.

Giuliani and Powell are basically the prototypical “Freedom Eagle dot Facebook” readers. They’re older; they’re conservative; they enjoy being online. They’ve also both been gradually alienated from institutions that once celebrated them. Giuliani was arguably at one point the most respected person in the United States, and since then he has: caused major embarrassment for the George W. Bush administration by recommending that now–convicted felon Bernard Kerik become the secretary of homeland security; run a failed presidential campaign; been rejected by Trump for a role in his own Cabinet; and gotten into what appears to be serious financial trouble because of his legal bills. According to a 2020 Washington Post profile, Powell’s career began swerving toward the fringe when she defended a bank executive accused of fraud related to the Enron collapse; she came to believe that the Department of Justice, where she’d once worked, had conspired against her client. That perspective gradually escalated to the belief that the DOJ is part of a string-pulling deep state apparatus that extends, apparently, across the world.

And then there’s Trump, whose entire biography has been interpreted by some as a campaign against wealthy Manhattan blue bloods and other cultural elites who treated him as a gauche tabloid novelty. His own social media feed is a fire hose of conspiracies. In a way, it’s his insistence on the supremacy of the credulous, angry, and incessant right-wing online experience that will be on trial in Georgia (and in the District of Columbia, where special counsel Jack Smith has charged Trump with, among other things, disseminating false claims about the election).

Although online disorientation may be disproportionately experienced by baby boomers, we would be remiss (and liable to hearing about it from our older relatives) not to acknowledge that each member of that generation is their own individual person, that many—so many!—are capable of separating fact from wishful thinking, and that some have never even heard of the Gateway Pundit.

Some, indeed, are greatly enjoying the Trump indictments. Those would be the Resistance Libs—the counter-movement of boomers who’ve responded to Trump’s presidency and alleged criminality by binging on left-leaning media outlets, fetishizing their supposed objectivity, and arguing with their right-wing age group peers in social media reply threads across the country. It’s the salad days for those folks.

One can only imagine how heated things will get in the livestream comments section of a televised Georgia Trump trial, should they be able to figure out how to use it. (Joking, joking.) Let’s get ready to rumble!