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.
A golden tray sits on the Resolute Desk as President Donald Trump speaks during an announcement on American nuclear innovation in the Oval Office at the White House on July 24, 2026, in Washington, D.C. Trump is signing multiple executive orders targeting the nuclear energy sector and easing rules for new reactors and nuclear fuel supply chains.
Trump’s hubris rivals the fallen heroes of ancient Greek mythology
In January, the New York Times asked President Donald Trump if there were any limits on his global powers.
“Yeah,” the president responded, “there is one thing. My own morality. My own mind. It’s the only thing that can stop me.”
That was eight months ago, but fortunately Christopher Nolan’s blockbuster adaptation of “The Odyssey” has made ancient Greek literature newly relevant. Before that window closes, I’d like to talk about hubris.
Today, the term mostly means excessive pride or arrogance. That’s part of what the Greeks meant by it too, but the meaning was a bit richer and more specific. Hubris was an insolent or outrageous act that offended the gods, often because the transgressor was claiming abilities or authorities that solely belonged to supreme beings.
Nolan renamed and slightly modified the concept of xenia for the film, calling it “Zeus’ law.” In the director’s telling, mortals should follow the rules laid out by the gods, specifically the requirement to treat strangers with respect lest they be gods in disguise.
In a sense, hubris is the opposite, or at least the rejection, of xenia. The hubris of the suitors, and at times Odysseus himself, invites punishment by the gods and their mortal instruments.
Which brings me back to Donald Trump. His claim that there are no constraints on his personal power to dictate events on the global stage was one of the greatest expressions of hubris ever uttered by a political leader.
Trump’s claim was obviously false when he made it.
He vowed that he could end the Russia-Ukraine war in 24 hours. He’s proved powerless to make that happen. If he had divine powers to work his will, why would he have balked at implementing his tariffs so often that Wall Street adopted the “TACO trade” term for his deals? “TACO” stands for “Trump always chickens out.”
And why would Trump have made so many embarrassing concessions to China — from rescinding tariffs on Chinese goods to allowing them to buy crucial and incredibly valuable computer chips?
But Trump saw his success at capturing Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro as proof of his ability to launch missiles to the same effect as Zeus’ lightning bolts. Trump believed he was the most powerful man who ever lived.
This is no exaggeration. In March, when the Iran invasion seemed successful, Trump gave a document penned by“Presidential Historian David King” to New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan purporting to prove that Trump was “the most powerful person to have EVER walked this planet.” King was, in fact, a businessman and occasional caddy for legendary golfer Gary Player.
King compared Trump favorably to many of history’s most powerful, and often heinous, figures: Alexander the Great, Attila the Hun, William the Conqueror, Napoleon Bonaparte, Joseph Stalin, Genghis Khan, Mao Tse Tung, Adolf Hitler and Vladimir Lenin. Many of these men thought they were the most powerful person in the world, too. And many were defeated precisely because they believed it.
At least Napoleon and Hitler had a string of truly impressive victories before they learned the folly of hubris. The limits on Trump’s power have been exposed by far less august forces than the combined might of the allies in World War II or the fearsome Russian winter.
Iran is a comparatively middling power. But the regime’s ability to absorb punishment while imposing its will on the Strait of Hormuz has proved to be a greater constraint on Trump’s power than his morality or mind. We should note that, at least rhetorically, his morality has not proved much of a constraint. He has repeatedly promised to destroy Iranian “civilization” if the regime refuses to capitulate.
But they haven’t — and won’t anytime soon — because the regime’s tolerance for pain far outstrips Trump’s. The combined fear of skyrocketing oil prices, outrage of Gulf state potentates, diminishing weapon supplies and domestic unpopularity is doing the work that international law, congressional oversight and the collective opinion of foreign policy experts can’t or won’t do.
If I considered Trump more heroic than reason and facts could allow, I would say his Sisyphean predicament has the whiff of Greek tragedy to it. Trump is vexed by the fact that the Iranians won’t honor deals or ratify his countless premature claims of victory — giving new meaning to his vow that his presidency would make people tired of winning. It’s almost like they’re out-Trumping Trump.
Things might have gone better if he’d heeded that great Greek tragedian Sophocles: “For Zeus utterly abhors the boasts of a proud tongue.”
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Jonah Goldberg is editor-in-chief of The Dispatch and the host of The Remnant podcast. His Twitter handle is @JonahDispatch.