Why the MAGA Right Became Obsessed With the Romanian Election
It started with a Russian influence campaign and a canceled vote. Then the American right showed up.
By Nicholas Casey
What ensued was an election unlike any other in Eastern Europe’s history, if not the internet age itself: one involving a cast of characters of the Make America Great Again movement that included the conspiracy theorist Alex Jones and Jack Posobiec, the internet provocateur who pushed “Pizzagate”; former Trump officials like Steve Bannon and Parscale; Elon Musk, the owner of X; the former Fox News host Tucker Carlson; and an Australian cryptocurrency entrepreneur, Mario Nawfal — all of whom have interviewed Georgescu or supported him in some public form since the Romanian election was canceled.
By winter, the canceled election had also begun catching on in the American right-wing environs of X, with posts containing words like “Romania,” “Georgescu” and “Bucharest” appearing six times more frequently than the six months prior and gaining more than 900 million views on the platform since December. By spring, Trump’s inner circle was directly lobbying the Romanians, an effort that included JD Vance, Trump’s vice president; Richard Grenell, the presidential envoy for special missions; and Trump Jr., who came with Thiess for another speaking engagement in Bucharest in April, only days before the election....
According to Romanian intelligence officials, the TikTok plot to push Georgescu to the presidency was run out of two shell companies with ties to Russia...
Back on TikTok, Romanian authorities would later report that more than 25,000 accounts — some which had been dormant since 2016 — suddenly activated. They began a kind of fake grass-roots campaign for Georgescu, flooding the internet with his name in hashtags and positive comments — which soon pushed him to the top of the algorithm.
Suddenly Romanian TikTok began to look different... Even Sosoaca, the banned candidate, could tell something strange was going on...
The only body with the power to take action was Romania’s Constitutional Court, a nine-member bench that, unlike the U.S. Supreme Court, can issue an order on its own initiative. On Dec. 4, Romanian authorities declassified a four-page summary of the intelligence it had on the TikTok plot, hoping for a long shot: that the judges would step in and annul the election. Two days later, in a unanimous decision, the judges did just that.
https://www.nytimes.com/2025/06/10/magazine/romania-election-tiktok-russia-maga.html