No, Pro-Trump Hackers Didn’t Hack Zohran Mamdani’s Election Night Party

Did you see claims on Tuesday that Zohran Mamdani’s election night party was sabotaged by pro-Trump hackers? Someone who supports President Donald Trump was supposedly able to project a pro-MAGA message to the crowd before Mamdani spoke. But like so much of what goes viral on social media these days, it’s total nonsense.

Mamdani was elected to be the next mayor of New York City on Tuesday, trouncing New York’s former governor, Andrew Cuomo. And many people tuned in Tuesday night to watch a PBS News livestream of Mamdani’s official watch party at the Brooklyn Paramount Theater, where Mamdani eventually gave his victory speech.

But before Mamdani spoke, far-right X users captured a clip from the livestream, showing a moment when a tweet from the White House was displayed for the crowd.

“BREAKING: Mayor elect Zohran Mamdani Headquarters screen was just hacked: ‘Trump is your president’,†wrote Dom Lucre, a conspiracy theorist who often spreads disinformation.

Countless X accounts shared the video, including Open Source Intel, End Wokeness, and the Elon Musk-promoted account “Retard Finder.â€

It wasn’t just X. From there, the claim spread far and wide, including on other platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Threads, and Facebook, as well as the media outlets like The Jerusalem Post. The claim also showed up on Reddit’s r/Politics before it was deleted. But all of these folks claiming Mamdani’s screen was hacked are simply wrong.

In reality, the screen at the Brooklyn Paramount was airing election night coverage from Spectrum News, a TV channel where reporters and pundits were discussing the night’s returns from across the country. The TV stream briefly displayed a tweet from the White House, which included a visual parody of the New York Knicks logo made to say “Trump is Your President.†Interestingly, the White House deleted that tweet from X and Bluesky around 12:35 p.m. ET on Wednesday.

But that was it. It wasn’t some ingenious infiltration by hackers. It was just the news talking briefly about a tweet from the White House. A tweet, it should be noted, that was pretty pathetic given all of the losses that Republicans notched Tuesday night.

President Trump sent out several posts on Truth Social trying to distance himself from the loss. But it seems like a safe bet that Trump wasn’t watching the PBS livestream or Spectrum News, which you can see below.

 

Trump was almost certainly watching Fox News, which specifically called out the high likelihood that the president was tuned in to the network. Fox host Trace Gallagher even looked into the camera at one point on Tuesday night and said, “…as always, if the president would like to call in and respond to Zohran Mamdani,  we’ve got a phone and we would happily put you on.â€

Some of the X posts that helped spread the false claim about a supposed “hack†have deleted their tweets, and the account End Wokeness edited it to change the caption. It now reads “On the big screen at Mamdani HQ: ‘Trump is your president.’â€

But some accounts still have the false claim up. Lucre’s tweet, which has logged 1.3 million views, has been up for 12 hours at the time of this writing and still doesn’t have a Community Note of any kind. And that speaks to the state of X right now, a social media platform run by billionaire Elon Musk, who has said he wants to “fix†the crowd-sourced fact-checking program.

The Tesla CEO openly talks about tinkering with the X algorithm and he did everything he could to get President Trump elected in 2024. But some people who don’t even support Trump and his band of fascists still post on X, their brains fully immersed in a disinformation machine designed to distort reality.

And whenever Musk tries to mess with X, especially when it comes to his AI chatbot Grok, things often go terribly wrong. Remember when Musk vowed to fix Grok and it started praising Adolf Hitler and calling for a second Holocaust? Or when it started responding to every question with a conspiracy theory about “white genocide†of farmers in South Africa?

Those are just the highly visible fuck-ups we see, but there are presumably countless other things we don’t see happening on a daily basis. And anyone who remains on X in 2025 needs to think long and hard about what that’s doing to their brain.

Out of curiosity, I asked Grok on Tuesday whether I should vote for Prop 50 in California, the redistricting measure supported by Democrats to counter the redistricting in Texas that will hand Republicans more seats in 2026. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that Grok told me to vote against it. The measure passed, with 63.8% voting in favor and 36.2% voting against, according to KPBS.