What Carthage was to Cato the Elder, the 2020 election is to Donald Trump.
It’s a topic of obsessive interest to him, and he insists — against all evidence — that the election was stolen from him.
So it’s no surprise that the president would, as he did last night, give a national address devoted to supposedly explosive new evidence that there was something untoward about the 2020 contest.
He described intelligence documents pointing to vulnerabilities in our elections and attempted meddling by China, but nothing he said provided any credence to his long-running claims that the 2020 election was illegitimate. Instead, the speech was mostly another attempt to push for changes to elections in the SAVE Act and, no doubt, to lay the groundwork for blaming Republican losses in the midterms on fraud.
In the speech, Trump described intelligence pointing to China’s acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files, which include names, addresses, phone numbers, and party registration. He said that evidence of this and attempts by China to meddle in the 2020 election were withheld from his daily intelligence briefings during his first term by members of the “Deep State.” In the speech, he said he was asking the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Department of Justice, the FBI, and the CIA “to investigate how and why such crucial information was hidden.”
Additionally, he pointed to intelligence assessments that U.S. election systems are vulnerable to hacking by foreign adversaries.
Obviously, any effort by China to hack voter files or interfere with U.S. elections is a bad thing and should be investigated. That said, even in Trump’s speech, which framed the intelligence in the most alarming possible way, there was no evidence presented that, if true, would indicate that China deleted or changed actual votes in an effort to elect Joe Biden.
Also, for all the fear of electronic voting machines, it should be noted that nearly all votes cast in the U.S. have a paper backup. And many states do audits in which samples of paper automatic ballots are compared with the electronic vote count, making sure that the two are consistent. That hasn’t stopped Trump, or his allies, from spreading fear about electronic voting as intrinsically suspect.
We prefer in-person, same-day voting, especially to the loose, heavily mail-in systems of places like California, but after years of fly-speck examination of everything having to do with the 2020 elections, Trump and his partisans have found no evidence that electoral cheating accounted for the results.
Trump was trailing in almost all the national polls prior to the 2020 election and proceeded to lose, whereas he was in a much stronger position in 2024 and proceeded to win. No elaborate theories are necessary to explain the different results.
Speaking of elections, Trump’s approval rating has been sinking, and Republicans face an uphill battle in this year’s midterms. Trying to revive widely unpopular “stolen election” claims won’t make their job any easier.