It's taken four years and a second presidential election, but one of the most notorious disinformation spreaders helping to boost Donald Trump's 2016 candidacy has been charged with federal election fraud.
The arrest Wednesday of 31-year-old Douglass Mackey, who was long a far-right force on social media using the pseudonym Ricky Vaughn, marks one of the few times an American individual has been accused of spreading voting misinformation — and one of the most prominent cases in years alleging criminal election cheating.
Trump, of course, left the Oval Office last week still spreading lies and fabrications about pervasive ballot manipulation and illegal voting, not only in the election he lost but also the time he won. The Justice Department says it's found no credible evidence to back him up, but does have evidence to prove Mackey deprived Hillary Clinton of at least 4,900 ballots four years ago.
He did so, federal prosecutors in Brooklyn said, by successfully conning that many supporters into believing they were casting a valid ballot for Clinton by posting a specific hashtag on Twitter or Facebook or by texting Clinton's name to a fake text code.
"Avoid the line. Vote from home," was the message he and unnamed co-conspirators allegedly worked to spread using an array of social media accounts, at least once tweeting the doctored image of a Black woman promoting the improper voting methods.
The alleged scheme "amounted to nothing short of vote theft," said William Sweeney, who runs the FBI office in New York City. "It is illegal behavior and contributes to the erosion of the public's trust in our electoral processes."
The Justice Department spent four years enduring whither criticism from Trump about its approach toward election crimes, most notably Robert Mueller's expansive inquiry into Russia's interference in the 2016 race and whether people in Trump's orbit conspired with those efforts.
"There is no place in public discourse for lies and misinformation to defraud citizens of their right to vote," said Seth DuCharme, the acting U.S. attorney in Brooklyn and a holdover from the Trump administration. "With Mackey's arrest, we serve notice that those who would subvert the democratic process in this manner cannot rely on the cloak of Internet anonymity to evade responsibility for their crimes."
The charging documents say that Mackey's main Twitter accounts, @Ricky_Vaughn99, had 58,000 followers at the time the social media behemoth got wind of his efforts and suspended the account just days before the 2016 election. Many of his posts that fall retweeted Trump and promoted white nationalist and racist views and conspiracy theories about voter fraud by Democrats.
The MIT Media Lab had rated it the 107th most important influencer of the upcoming presidential contest — ahead of such accounts as those belonging to former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, "Late Show" host Stephen Colbert and NBC News.
In 2018, HuffPost revealed Mackey was the person posing as Vaughn and detailed his connections to the far right, labeling him "Trump's most influential white nationalist troll."
The alias for Mackey, who lives in Vermont but was arrested in Florida, appears to be a reference to Charlie Sheen's character in the 1989 film "Major League," a convicted car thief with bad eyesight but significant pitching talent. If convicted, he faces up to 10 years in prison.
image of U.S. President Donald Trump is displayed on a digital billboard in Times Square in New York on April 8, 2026.
Trump is stuck between two realities. Neither serves the American people
Normally, I worry that events may overtake a column. But not so with the Iran war.
I don’t worry about running afoul of a headline or Truth Social post from the president because what is said about the situation is no longer very relevant to the reality.
On April 8, Nick Catoggio, my Dispatch colleague, dubbed an earlier stoppage with Iran “Schrödinger’s ceasefire.” This was a reference to the famous thought experiment by the physicist Erwin Schrödinger, who was trying to explain the weirdness of “superpositionality” in quantum physics. A cat in a box is both dead and alive at the same time until you open the box. Schrödinger meant to illustrate the absurdity of the idea that particles aren’t any one thing, but a “cloud of probabilities.”
The Trump administration is stuck in a word cloud of probabilities of his own making. The war is over. The war is on. The war isn’t a war. We have a deal, but we don’t have a deal, but we’re about to have a deal. We destroyed Iran’s military. No, we left it intact. We want regime change. No we don’t. We already accomplished it. We “obliterated” Iran’s nuclear program a year ago. We had to go to war in February to prevent nuclear war. The Strait of Hormuz is open, closed, or something in-between. No deal without “unconditional surrender.” Let’s make a deal!
This everything-all-at-once vibe can be disorienting, particularly since most Americans didn’t have a war with Iran on their bingo cards until the shooting had already started. President Trump didn’t prepare the country or consult with Congress beforehand because he thought it would all be a smashing success in a matter of weeks.
The miscalculation that started it all: killing Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, and much of Iran’s senior leadership, on the first day of the war. To “the great proud people of Iran, I say tonight that the hour of your freedom is at hand,” Trump announced on Feb. 28. “When we are finished, take over your government. It will be yours to take. This will be probably your only chance for generations.”
I support regime change in Iran and shed no tears for Khamenei or his goons. But when you start a war by killing the regime’s top leaders, it’s not unreasonable for the remaining ones to conclude that you really intend regime change.
Khamenei was a murderous fanatic, but he was a fairly cautious one. He liked to threaten closing the Strait of Hormuz or attacking our regional allies, but he was reluctant to actually do it, fearing it would invite a regime change war. The mullahs and IRGC goons believed, not unreasonably, that if they lost their grip on power, they’d be lynched by the Iranian people they’ve brutalized for decades.
By starting with a regime change war, Trump removed any reason for the regime not to go for broke. When you have nothing to lose — particularly when you are a millenarian religious fanatic — a Persian Alamo strategy makes a lot of sense.
So Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz and attacked its neighbors.
But it turns out this wasn’t the Alamo. In the contest of wills, Trump blinked. The Iranian regime’s tolerance for punishment proved — so far — to be greater than Trump’s and that of our gulf allies. Militarily we could finish the job, but that would require ground troops and much greater economic turmoil. In a conflict Trump launched unilaterally without the prior support of Congress, NATO or the American people, Trump doesn’t have the political capital for that.
But that’s only half the problem. Trump wants the war over, but he doesn’t want to pay — militarily, economically, politically — what that would cost. So he wants to make a deal that ends it. But there is no deal available that wouldn’t come at an equally undesirable cost. Any deal that looks like what President Obama struck with the Iranians would be too embarrassing to bear. But the Iranians are convinced that they can get just such a deal, and they’re willing to drag things out as long as it takes.
The result: Trump’s in a box of his own making. He thinks he can talk his way out by simply asserting a reality that doesn’t exist. When the financial markets get nervous, he announces a breakthrough that is, at best, a possibility. When the Iranians agree to a deal that looks similar to one Obama might negotiate, Trump goes back to his threats.
It can’t go on forever. But I’m sure it’ll last until long after this column is forgotten.
Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.