Republican National Committee co-Chair Lara Trump suggested in an interview with Fox News’s Sean Hannity on Monday night that the “deep state” is responsible for tribulations former President Trump has faced — from the hacking of his campaign to the technical glitches that delayed the start to his interview with Elon Musk on Monday.
“Yeah, Sean, I think it’s pretty obvious at this point. There are a lot of people out there, and there’s a massive effort, of course, to keep Donald Trump out of the White House,” the former president’s daughter-in-law said in the interview.
“These people are terrified. This is the deep state. This is a swamp in Washington, D.C. These are the people who are our adversaries in many cases, and they know that the jig is up, the game is over, when Donald J. Trump returns to the White House. And they’re petrified of it,” she continued.
Lara Trump offered no direct evidence for her charges of “deep state” involvement in either of the attacks. The deep state generally refers to people working within the government, and has been used by the former president and his allies in the past as an enemy to bolster their supporters.
Iran appears to be the primary suspect in the hack of the campaign, according to a report from Microsoft citing an Iran-backed group and a phishing email, though Tehran has denied the accusations. The FBI announced it was investigating Monday evening.
Donald Trump’s interview with Musk on Monday night began more than 40 minutes late, after technical glitches prevented some people from joining — reminiscent of the troubled presidential campaign launch of Florida Gov. Ron DeSantis (R) on the social platform X’s Spaces feature.
It is unclear what caused the technical glitches in Musk’s Monday interview.
Lara Trump, in making her deep state accusation, was responding to Hannity’s suggestion that the same people were behind the campaign hack and the technical difficulties of the X interview.
“We’re not dealing with amateurs here,” Hannity said. “Now they have gone hard after Elon Musk tonight, and limiting the number of people that could listen to your father-in-law earlier tonight.”
Musk blamed the issue on what he called a “massive DDOS,” or denial-of-service attack, targeting the platform.