Falsely insisting President Donald Trump won the 2020 election is pretty much a job requirement to serve in his administration. But if you are a conspiracy-addled hardcore election denier, then you get a job overseeing elections!
In August, Trump invented the position “deputy assistant secretary for election integrity” in the Department of Homeland Security, and gave it to Heather Honey, who has no professional background in the federal government or election administration. But what she lacks in experience, she makes up for in true devotion to Trump’s Big Lie, having pushed mangled election data and misinformation to prop up his conspiracies.
And now we know what Honey’s tenure will involve, thanks to The New York Times.
On a recent call with election officials from almost every state, Honey took up Trump’s familiar and well-debunked complaints. The call’s actual election officials, knowledgeable and dedicated to their profession, were no doubt thrilled to have a right-wing kook repeatedly bring up how voting machines were somehow rigged for Democrats.
Honey also told them that government-employed experts in combating election misinformation are the real problem, and that they have “strayed from their mission.”
To be fair, the current electoral success of Trump and the GOP largely relies on election misinformation, so having a government entity dedicated to stopping that does pose a bit of a problem for them.
The New York Times also got its hands on a recording of Honey speaking to her fellow conspiracy theorists in March, before joining the administration. Honey said that Trump could declare a “national emergency” based on an “actual investigation” of 2020, and that then “we can take these other steps without Congress and we can mandate that states do things and so on.”
In a brief moment of reflection, she added, “I don’t know if that’s really feasible and if the people around the president would let him test that theory.”
As if there were anyone left around Trump that would stop him from doing anything.
Honey is not the only conspiracy theorist now in a position to shape American elections. Earlier this month, the White House hired Kurt Olsen, a “Stop the Steal” lawyer, to be a special government employee tasked with investigating the 2020 election. He also plans to weed out anyone disloyal to Trump, because of course.
Olsen is so deep in the denier lore that he served as MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell’s lawyer for whatever Lindell thinks are election issues. Olsen’s devotion to Lindell has not waned, no matter how hard Lindell has beclowned himself. This past summer, Olsen testified in Lindell’s Colorado defamation trial, where Lindell was sued by a former employee of Dominion Voting Systems. He told the jury, “I would trust Mike with my life,” and that Lindell was “the lone voice keeping the discussion [of election fraud] alive.”
God, imagine stanning Mike Lindell in the year of our Lord 2025.
Fun fact: As a special government employee, Olsen doesn’t have to publicly declare his private business interests for over a hundred days—so convenient!
When it comes to genuinely protecting elections, the Trump administration has hollowed everything out.
Trump cut funding for the group that provided cybersecurity threat-monitoring and assistance for state and local government election officials. Congress slashed the budget for the Election Assistance Commission from $55 million in 2024 to $15 million in 2025.
It’s fair to say that Honey and Olsen are part of Trump’s whole-of-government approach to weaken and warp elections in America. From trying to ban mail-in voting to stocking his administration with election deniers, Trump’s got it all.
