Republican National Committee co-chair Lara Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity on Monday night that the “deep state” is responsible for the former president’s ordeal, from the hacking of his campaign to the technical glitch that delayed the start of an interview with Elon Musk on Monday.
“Yeah, Sean, it’s pretty clear now. There’s a lot of people out there, and there’s definitely a huge effort to keep Donald Trump out of the White House,” the former president’s daughter-in-law said in an interview.
“These people are scared. This is the deep state. This is the swamp of Washington, D.C. These are our adversaries in many cases, and they know that when Donald J. Trump comes back into the White House, it’s all over, it’s game over. And they’re scared,” she continued.
Lara Trump has provided no direct evidence of “deep state” involvement in either attack. Deep state generally refers to people working within the government, and the former president and his allies have used it in the past as an adversary to support their supporters.
According to Microsoft’s report, Iran appears to be the primary suspect in the campaign hack, citing Iran-backed groups and phishing emails, but Tehran denies the accusations. The FBI announced Monday evening that it was investigating.
On Monday night, Donald Trump’s interview with Musk started more than 40 minutes late after some people were unable to join due to technical errors, reminiscent of the issues Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) had with launching his presidential campaign on social platform X’s Spaces feature.
It’s unclear what caused the technical glitch, Musk said in an interview Monday.
Lara Trump’s accusations of the deep state were in response to Hannity’s assertion that the same people were behind the campaign hacking and the technical difficulties of the X interview.
“We’re not dealing with amateurs here,” Hannity said. “Now they’re going hard on Elon Musk tonight and limiting the number of people who can hear his father-in-law early tonight.”
Musk called the problem a “massive DDOS,” or denial-of-service, attack targeting the platform.
