The ‘Doom’ Computer Game Was Part Of Trump’s Wild And Baseless ‘Election Security Nightmare’

Things got really weird during President Donald Trump’s big speech on “election security” Thursday night. 

The centerpiece of the event was a document dump that was posted to the White House website, which Trump claimed to summarize during his televised primetime address. The supposed evidence contained in the reams of pdfs included a wild anecdote about the iconic 1990s computer shooter game “Doom” that underscored just how far the president was reaching as he tried to substantiate his theories.  

In the address to the nation, which was only carried by some networks, Trump reiterated his thoroughly debunked claims about the integrity of the American election system. Trump’s latest case centered on questionable intelligence related to supposed Chinese interference in voting and one of the GOP’s favorite false conspiracy theories: the non-existent bogeyman of non-citizen voting. The president used these paranoid fantasies to argue for his administration’s push to obtain voter data from Democratic states and for the passage of the SAVE America Act, legislation that would impose draconian voter suppression measures designed to help Republicans win the midterms. 

Among many other things, the president suggested Chinese influence campaigns and “meddling” targeted him specifically because of his hard line against Beijing. He also claimed China had managed to obtain voter data. The U.S. and other foreign governments have a long history of attempting to sway public opinion in rival nations. Chinese and American hackers have also accessed private data from citizens in both countries. However, nothing the president pointed to showed any level of decisive or unprecedented foreign influence in American elections. He also suggested one of his favorite targets, “deep state” forces within the U.S. government, had covered up China’s plotting and withheld information about it in his first term. 

These claims came as Trump summarized a trove of recently declassified files that supposedly supported his case. 

“For many years, Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems — dishonest almost all. They’re vulnerable and they’re easily compromised and people within our government do that,” Trump claimed. “Tonight we’re publishing a series of previously classified U.S. intelligence community assessments and other reports proving that our government has long known these machines are extremely exposed to attack.” 

We will be poring over this stuff for some time, but even at first glance, the documents clearly show how questionable Trump’s purported claims about election interference, high-level conspiracies, and vulnerable machinery are. One initial example we spotted is a crazy incident involving “Doom” that was seemingly initially shared by an anonymous Twitter user who attended a hacking conference. It was presented as solid proof of U.S. elections’ insecurity. 

The trove of files released by the White House on Thursday include emails from Trump’s first term that show intelligence officials arguing over the idea China was “engaged in election influence.” This view was described as a “minority” perspective within the intelligence community. In spite of this disagreement, this viewpoint was allowed to be presented in certain reports that were also included in Trump’s trove. 

One January 2020 memorandum from the National Intelligence Council that was contained in the document dump outlined supposed “Vulnerabilities In US 2020 Election Infrastructure.” That memo, which was declassified by Trump’s conspiracy-minded former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard and approved for release by the president earlier this month, featured a “Pollbook Hacking Example” involving “Doom.” 

This supposed proof of serious vulnerability was simply a photo of a “pollbook” that was described as having been “modified at the 2019 Defcon Voting Machine Hacking Village to run the popular video game ‘Doom.’” The memorandum noted this claim was solely “according to press reporting” from the hacking event.

This picture, which was treated as a serious example of threats to election infrastructure, seemingly came from a tweet posted by someone with the username “l33tLumberjack” that was included in a Washington Post article about the 2019 Def Con hacking conference. 

“Doom on a electronic pollbook? Yes please!” l33tLumberjack said. 

“Doom,” a sci-fi shooter that was originally released in 1993 and revolutionized the gaming industry, is a relatively simple piece of software and porting it onto various devices has become something of a tradition for hackers eager to demonstrate their prowess or expose security vulnerabilities. 

While the Post reported that hackers at Def Con 2019 were able to easily break into devices including election poll books and ballot printers, the article also pointed out that the National Association of Secretaries of State described a prior version of the demonstration as “unrealistic” since it does not match the actual conditions under which these devices are used. Many key election systems are never connected to the internet and multiple states that use electronic systems also have paper records. Election officials at every level of government — including members of Trump’s first administration — have rejected the notion of widespread fraud in the 2020 race despite the president’s persistent claims. 

Of course, expert consensus and consistent debunking has never stopped Trump from seeking out fringe theories and questionable evidence to deny his loss in the 2020 election and try to restrict voting in future races. In his speech, along with revealing the document dump, Trump encouraged his supporters to call lawmakers and press Congress to pass the SAVE America Act. He also announced that he directed the Department of Homeland Security to order states to remove non-citizens from the voting rolls. Ahead of the speech, Politico reported DHS is set to announce it identified tens of thousands of ineligible voters, though it is not clear how it reached its conclusions, nor whether the agency has evidence any of these people ever actually cast a ballot. 

Trump’s document dump and associated remarks may have lacked substance and seriousness. However, they prove he is not letting go of his conspiracy theories about voting or giving up on attempts to interfere with it in the future. In that way, Trump’s remarks envisioned a doom far realer than any sci-fi shooting game. 

“We can never be hacked and we can never watch a stolen election again,” Trump declared, before adding, “Together we will restore faith and confidence in our country and we will be bigger, better and stronger than ever before.”