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Fixated Trump Is Still Trying To Overturn The 2020 Election

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Donald Trump’s grievance over the 2020 election hasn’t faded five months into the Biden administration — it’s just migrated online.

Nearly a year and a half after Election Day, Trump was still telling anyone who would listen that Joe Biden’s win was illegitimate, and the claim hadn’t lost any of its pull inside MAGA world. On MSNBC, University of Maryland computer science professor Jen Golbeck, who studies online disinformation and radicalization, walked through what that fixation actually looks like once it hits the internet’s darker corners — the forums, group chats and QAnon-adjacent channels where the “stolen election” story keeps mutating.

• Golbeck, a researcher who tracks algorithmic radicalization and extremist online subcultures, broke down how Trump’s continued election claims are being repackaged and spread in MAGA and QAnon-adjacent spaces.
• By early June 2021, Trump remained publicly fixated on relitigating certified vote totals despite dozens of dismissed post-election court challenges.
• The ongoing 2021 partisan ballot review in Maricopa County, Arizona, was actively fueling conspiracy theories, including fringe claims that Trump would somehow be “reinstated.”

The Professor Tracking the Fringe

Golbeck isn’t a pundit parachuting into politics for a hit — she’s a computer scientist who spends her research life crawling the platforms and communities where conspiracy theories incubate before they surface in the mainstream. That background is what made her MSNBC appearance different from the usual panel discussion: she wasn’t speculating about what Trump’s base believes, she was describing what she’s actually watching them post.

Inside the Echo Chambers

According to Golbeck, the “stolen election” narrative hasn’t cooled off in the places she monitors — if anything, it’s calcified. She described a self-reinforcing loop in QAnon-adjacent spaces where every failed lawsuit, every debunked fraud claim, gets reframed not as proof Trump lost, but as proof the system is rigged against him. That reframing is what keeps grievance alive months after the actual votes were counted, certified and, in most contested states, recounted.

The claims don’t need to survive a courtroom to survive online — they just need to survive the next repost.

Arizona’s Audit Keeps the Grievance Alive

Nothing gave the movement fresher oxygen than the Arizona Senate’s ballot review in Maricopa County, where contractors were hand-recounting roughly 2.1 million ballots inside the Veterans Memorial Coliseum in Phoenix. Golbeck pointed to the audit as a live case study: a real, ongoing process that far-right online communities were already treating as the vehicle that might somehow flip Arizona and, in the more unhinged corners of the conversation, put Trump back in the White House before his term would have ended.

That “reinstatement” theory has no basis in the Constitution or any legal process, but Golbeck’s research shows it circulating as a sincere expectation among some Trump supporters — evidence, she argued, of how thoroughly the disinformation has replaced the actual outcome in parts of the base’s worldview.

The Toll on Democratic Norms

Trump has already burned through dozens of legal challenges in states including Arizona, Georgia and Pennsylvania, all dismissed for lack of evidence, and his own Justice Department found no fraud significant enough to change the outcome. Yet the fixation persists, and Golbeck’s larger point was about what sustained repetition does to a democracy: distrust in certified results doesn’t need new evidence to spread, it just needs an audience willing to keep sharing it.

The Maricopa County recount had no announced completion date as of early June, and every week it dragged on gave Golbeck’s online communities another news cycle to point to. Whatever the final tally shows, the segment’s real subject wasn’t Arizona’s ballots — it was how long a debunked grievance can keep circulating once it finds a permanent home online.