Donald Trump has revived an old conspiracy theory about the 2020 US presidential election, and he has done so by bringing up an Italian company: Leonardo, the large group that works mainly in the defence and aerospace sector. It is a story that has been circulating online for years in MAGA circles, being dredged up in waves and each time coming back with some new detail, but without any credible evidence ever emerging.

The journalist Alan Friedman, who lives and works in Italy, was also quick to point out the level of the affair: “A crazy, lunatic fantasy, which we imagine the Meloni government will immediately condemn in a statement today.” Will it happen?

What happened this time

This time Trump shared (on Truth Social, via a screenshot) a post published on X by the account ‘The SCIF’. The text claims that a certain Maria Zack had ‘testified’ about an international election fraud operation: Barack Obama, the CIA, the FBI, China, money transfers and ‘operatives’ between Italy and Switzerland were involved. The most relevant passage – and also the most useful to the logic of the conspiracy – is the one that calls Leonardo into question, because it attributes to “Italian officials” of the company the use of military satellites to hack election machines in the United States and “overturn” votes from Trump to Biden, through alleged tools developed by the CIA with names that recur frequently in these narratives, such as “Hammer” and “Scorecard”.

Those who have been following this thread for some time recognise it immediately: it is the updated version of a theory known online as ‘Italygate‘ or ‘#ItalyDidIt‘, which had been circulating for some time in late 2020 and early 2021. The basic idea is that Trump’s defeat was not ‘real’, but produced by technological sabotage led by shadowy apparatchiks and aided by pieces of foreign governments. Italy, in this narrative, appears often because it is a convenient ally to evoke: close enough to the US to seem plausible, ‘far enough away’ to allow any insinuation.

On this point, it is useful to make explicit who is the person called into question in the post relaunched by Trump. Maria Strollo Zack is a recurring figure in the genealogy of ‘Italygate’: Reuters indicated her as the chair (president) of the US organisation Nations in Action, the one that in January 2021 issued a statement claiming – without verifiable grounds – that an IT expert linked to Leonardo had interfered with the presidential elections using computer systems and military satellites.

A recycled theory that does not stand up to scrutiny

Over the years, the story has taken different forms but with very similar ingredients. One recurring piece is the quotation of statements and documents attributed to people presented as being linked to Leonardo, in particular the ‘affidavit’ attributed to Arturo D’Elia and relaunched in countless social versions. Another almost fixed element is the ‘technological’ dimension: satellites, transmission centres, hubs in Italy (Pescara is often mentioned), and then ‘secret’ instruments that are supposed to make an invisible reversal of results possible. It is a type of narrative that works because it resembles a thriller: it brings together powerful names, technical details and a great collective culprit, the ‘deep state’.

The problem is that when these allegations were subjected to journalistic and institutional scrutiny, they did not hold up. Reuters, as early as 2021, reconstructed the spread of ‘Italygate’ and concluded that there was no legitimate evidence of Leonardo’s interference in the 2020 US elections; and also explained how some ‘evidence’ circulated online was contradicted by verifiable records and chronologies, as well as denied by legal and corporate sources.

For Italy, however, this story has another very real aspect: it is not just ‘social folklore’. In recent years, the accusations against Leonardo have also entered the judicial sphere. In Rome, four people have ended up on trial for defamation in conspiracy in relation to the dissemination of documents believed to be false that implicated Leonardo and one of its employees in the alleged hacking of the American elections; Leonardo is listed as a person aggrieved in the proceedings. The Corriere della Sera reported the story in similar terms, reconstructing the genesis of the hoax and its attempted accreditation.

Why Trump’s relaunch also relies on the industrial plan

It is also for this reason that Trump’s revival should not just be read as a social weirdness. Leonardo is a strategic group, with complex industrial and institutional relations, and when a leading American political figure amplifies unfounded accusations concerning it, the effect is not so much to ‘convince’ the most sceptical readers as to put a suspicion back into circulation. The point, in these cases, is not to prove: it is to insinuate.

And here we can add an ‘Andreottian’ level of interpretation, in the sense of the old adage ‘it is a mistake to think wrongly, but it is often right’: these continuous inferences against a major European defence champion come at a time when, according to various press reconstructions, the Trump administration is showing irritation at Europe’s ambitions to buy more ‘at home’ and strengthen an autonomous industrial base. The Trumpian wish is well known: Europe must yes spend more on defence, but without reducing the share of purchases from American industry, on the contrary increasing it. Reuters reported on US objections to European push for ‘buy European‘ preferences, and Bloomberg reported pressure in that direction.

After all, the strength of ‘Italygate’ has never been in the evidence, but in its political utility. It serves to recount a defeat as a theft, and to shift the discussion from the more boring terrain – the numbers, the verdicts, the verifications – to the more emotional one of a global conspiracy. Whether or not that global conspiracy should pass through an Italian satellite or a large Italian company is a minor detail. For those who tell it, the important thing is that the story continues to spin.