Trump accuses China of interfering in the election, but the very documents he has declassified contradict him

Trump has been claiming for years that the US electoral system is rigged. On Thursday evening, speaking from the White House, he promised to provide evidence. But the documents he had declassified largely suggest the opposite, as the New York Times reports. "Great harm has been done to our country," he said in his prime-time address. “Our elections have remained vulnerable to fraud and theft, and the trust of the American people has been lost.” He announced the declassification of intelligence documents concerning the “shocking vulnerabilities” of the voting system. The main target is China. According to Trump, Beijing has bought, stolen or hacked the data of tens of millions of voters in eighteen states since 2020. “The biggest electoral data breach in history”, involving 220 million voter records. The narrative is the usual one: a “deep state” that has covered it all up, failing to inform either him or Congress.

However, the documents published on the White House website tell a different story. One, for example, shows that vote-counting systems would be difficult to manipulate on a scale large enough to alter an election result. John Solomon, who heads Trump’s task force on declassification, told reporters that the intelligence documents show no evidence of vote tampering in the last three elections. As for the Chinese data, intelligence and congressional officials have long been aware that Beijing acquired it, but this information is largely in the public domain and is often purchased by the election campaigns themselves. Former officials told the New York Times that it was not used to manipulate results, but to mount more targeted influence campaigns. The documents themselves, according to the newspaper, admit that Beijing never endorsed a concerted effort to ensure Trump’s defeat.

The vulnerabilities Trump is denouncing are, in part, those created by his own administration through the dismantling of previous structures: the FBI’s task force on foreign influence has been disbanded; the Office of the Director of National Intelligence has cut the unit that monitored foreign interference; and CISa – the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency – has been stripped of its staff. Trump has appointed an heir to a property fortune, with no experience in the sector, as acting Director of National Intelligence.

On Russia, however, Trump said almost nothing. In 2020, most US intelligence agencies had assessed the Russian campaign against Biden as the most aggressive form of foreign interference (a view contested at the time by John Ratcliffe, then Director of National Intelligence, who argued that the agencies had underestimated China’s role). Yesterday, Trump barely mentioned Moscow and even alluded – in a digression about ‘burn bags’ (sacks used to destroy government documents) and Barack Obama – to the alleged ‘grand conspiracy’ by the Democrats, which his Department of Justice is investigating in order to link it to Russia.

Trump concluded his speech by returning to an old pet subject: Congress must pass the Save America Act, the legislation that would restrict postal voting and require proof of citizenship and identification to vote. “The only reason not to do this is that you want to cheat,” he told reluctant Republicans. But the allegations at the heart of the speech have almost nothing to do with the measures set out in the bill.

Reactions were swift. California Governor Gavin Newsom pointed out that electoral fraud is extremely rare and almost always perpetrated by American citizens. Even Fox News, which broadcast the speech live, said it could not “corroborate” the President’s claims. Trump responded by attacking ABC and NBC, the networks that did not air his speech: “They know how corrupt the system is and they are part of the conspiracy,” he said, threatening to revoke their licences.

Not surprisingly, Trump’s victories in 2016 and 2024 are left out of the discussion: they have never been called into question. With four months to go until November’s mid-term elections, and with the Republicans at risk of losing Congress, Trump’s speech has been presented as a precautionary measure. But the facts cited, the allegations and the insistence on a cover-up all relate to the election six years ago. The target does not appear to be the upcoming election. It is, once again, the one that has already passed.