On the menu today: I don’t know how many Americans still take the president seriously, or whether they see him addressing the country from the Oval Office, offering an extremely familiar rant about stolen elections, and just tune him out and focus on summer vacations, baseball, and arguing about Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey movie. (Spoiler alert for the post-credit scene revealed here.) You can argue that if the president was taking his arguments seriously, the evidence for all the foreign interference would be laid out clearly on a website with as few redactions as possible. You can also argue that if the president believed what he said last night, our foreign policy toward China and Xi Jinping would look dramatically different. But let’s be generous to the president and take his arguments seriously. Read on.
President Trump’s Midsummer Night’s Dream
The president of the United States, addressing the nation and the world last night: “Over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People’s Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files. That information includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political party preferences and other sensitive data.”
If by “voter files,” the president means voter registration records . . . voter registration records are public information. Different states do have limits on who can access those records, in attempts to prevent identity theft and other abuse of that information. Oftentimes, that information must be purchased from the state government. But this list, collated by the National Council of State Legislatures, lays out how in many states, you can just buy the voter registration list. In fact, later in his remarks, President Trump said voter data “in 18 states have been bought, stolen, or hacked by China.”
If state governments are selling this data, it might be considered sensitive, but it cannot really be considered secret. And if you’re really concerned about a foreign government getting their hands on it, maybe you shouldn’t offer it for sale.
With that said, the evidence that the government of the People’s Republic of China is hostile to the United States is overwhelming, and it is entirely rational to be concerned about what the PRC would want to do with all that information.
President Trump continued, “This data loss presents an unprecedented election security nightmare.* The intelligence even shows that China assigned a data exploitation unit specifically to this new project.”
The good news is that on the White House website, you can click on a link to the documents supporting the president’s assertions. The bad news is that they’re in a zip file that must be downloaded. (Apparently, scanning the key documents and laying them out on a webpage was too much to ask. The president speaks as if what is in these documents is the most important revelation ever, but no one on his staff put in the work to lay out the information clearly and completely.)
But an even more serious problem is that the documents are heavily redacted. For example, one page is nearly entirely blacked out, with just the words “PRC,” “increase,” “f [sic] U.S. presidential election-related intelligence, collected publicly available information from a U.S.,” and “learned from public” remaining. Maybe that page amounts to a smoking gun about Chinese malfeasance; maybe it’s not much of anything. With so much redacted, it is impossible to tell.
Almost all the two pages of a document that appears to be from the Presidential Daily Briefing of June 25, 2020, are blacked out. One small unredacted portion mentions “warn a White House official that Beijing had derogatory information on him in an effort to compel him to take a restrained approach to China. . . . China’s attempt to use blackmail against a U.S. official. . . . We assess that this threat is credible.” That sounds serious enough, but we have no idea who made the threat, which White House official was threatened with blackmail, or what happened subsequently. And from what we can tell, that’s about blackmail, not tampering with election results or voter fraud.
(By the way . . . why is all this stuff still redacted? Can’t the president order it to be declassified?)
Trump followed up this announcement by alleging a conspiracy against him within the U.S. intelligence community. “Yet those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden. They did not disclose to me as president or to anyone else. And to the best of our knowledge, they did not inform Congress. In fact, all they kept saying is, ‘This is the most secure election in the history of our country’ — a standard, very pat line that was divvied out to say.”
If I were president, and I believed that the U.S. intelligence community had hidden information about a plot to meddle in an election from me, I would be livid with whoever had been serving as U.S. director of national intelligence at that time. The DNI at the time was John Ratcliffe. Upon winning reelection, Trump made Ratcliffe CIA director, and Ratcliffe serves in that position to this day. (Note that on December 22, 2020, in recognition of his national security achievements as both director of national intelligence and the CIA, President Trump awarded Ratcliffe the National Security Medal, the nation’s highest honor for distinguished achievement in the field of intelligence and national security.)
Trump continued, “The cover up of this colossal security breach is even more disturbing in light of the additional information showing that China engaged in other election-related activities to undermine my first administration and our 2020 campaign.”
Again, the evidence that the regime in China is opposed to American interests and regularly takes action to undermine and oppose our national interest is overwhelming. The problem is this president rarely, if ever, acts as if Xi Jinping is opposed to our interests. In fact, the president often goes out of his way to emphasize what a good relationship he has with Xi, and how highly he thinks of Xi. At the president’s summit with Xi in Beijing this year, Trump said, “It’s an honor to be your friend,” “You’re a great leader, I say it to everybody,” and “He’s a very smart man.”
But it goes well beyond praise of Xi.
Trump openly defied the law on TikTok, keeping a major Chinese influence and propaganda tool in place. Despite the assurances from Trump, national security experts argue the new arrangement does not address the national security threat posed by the app, because ByteDance keeps ownership of the algorithm’s intellectual property and licenses it to the joint venture for a fee. If the PRC wants to use the TikTok algorithm to influence what Americans see and hear, they can still do that.
Trump is now allowing American companies to sell advanced chips to Chinese companies, reversing a Biden-era ban. He clearly has no interest in bringing up the lab leak in any significant way.
Last fall, Japanese Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi got into an increasingly fierce war of words with the Chinese government after saying that Japan would have to respond if China invaded Taiwan. The only statement of support for the prime minister came from the U.S. ambassador to Japan, two weeks into the dispute.
The Trump administration barred the travel plans of the Taiwanese president.
Taiwan is still waiting for the delivery of roughly $29 billion in U.S. arms and weapons systems that they paid for years ago. Earlier this year, Navy Secretary Hung Cao announced that a $14 billion arms sale to Taiwan was delayed indefinitely because “right now, we’re doing a pause in order to make sure we have the munitions we need for Epic Fury.” Shortly thereafter, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth said that was not the case. “I would not couple the two in any way at all.”
In fact, it’s particularly rich for Trump to spend a prime-time address thundering about Chinese cyberespionage after he and his administration “halted plans to impose sanctions on China’s Ministry of State Security over a massive cyber espionage campaign in order to avoid derailing the trade truce presidents Trump and Xi Jinping struck in October.” Look, either this is a serious enough national security threat to warrant a major response, or it’s a bargaining chip in a trade deal, but it can’t be both.
If the president believes everything he said in his speech last night, this morning we should be seeing a dramatic sea change in U.S. foreign policy toward China, becoming a stance at least as adversarial as it was toward the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Color me highly skeptical that will happen.
But toward the end, Trump got to the point of what he wanted Americans to believe: Our elections are fraudulent and rigged, and your casting of a ballot is a bad joke — a naïve participation in a duplicitous sham that is corrupt to the core:
Put together, these disclosures reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it. It is not defensible.
Hundreds of millions of U.S. voter files are in the hands of foreign governments. Our machines and ballot counting systems are exposed to hacking and manipulation and corruption. China and other countries have been trying to meddle in our elections. Evidence of fraud has been buried. Hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls.
First, “everything is rigged, your vote is meaningless” is not quite the get-out-the-vote message that the National Republican Congressional Committee, National Republican Senatorial Committee, the Republican Governors Association, and the Republican State Leadership Committee want to hear. This is how you end up with two Democratic senators representing Georgia.
Second, while the outcome of the 2026 midterms is not set in stone, the cement is not as wet as it was a few months ago. Midterms traditionally go badly for the president’s party. President Trump’s approval rating has been around 40 percent since late last year, and that does not look likely to change between now and November. Thirty-six House Republicans retired, creating open seat races that are usually a little tougher to win than running an incumbent. The generic ballot polling numbers are not the worst they’ve ever been for the GOP, but they still favor the Democrats. Seven Republican senators retired, creating open seat races. Some states that once looked safe for Republicans, like Iowa and Ohio, now look competitive, and North Carolina and Georgia might not even be all that close.
In all likelihood, Democrats will be celebrating on the night of Tuesday, November 3. And President Trump will be once again arguing that his party’s defeats were not genuine, that it’s all hacked votes and foreign interference and deep state conspiracies.
*Hey, remember the Office of Personnel Management hack in 2015, where Chinese hackers obtained 22 million confidential records, including security background checks for security clearances, that included the uncovered intimate personal details of federal workers’ infidelity, drug abuse, and personal debts, etc.? Remember how beyond two resignations, no one in the U.S. government was ever really held accountable for the worst hack of government data ever?
ADDENDA: In case you missed it yesterday, Maine Senator Susan Collins is sitting on a campaign war chest of at least $11 million and is still waiting to know who her Democratic opponent is going to be. I’m not saying this Senate race is over, but that to-be-determined Democratic nominee will have to make rapidly up a lot of ground to have a chance.
. . . Speaking of Maine’s Senate race, in the latest issue of the print magazine, I write up how Graham Platner’s defenders tried to turn “authenticity” into the preeminent political virtue, ahead of those stodgy, old-fashioned virtues like “not being a Nazi,” “not hitting on teenagers on the social media app Kik,” and “not raping people.”
. . . No, I do not think a 2 percent inflation rate is an unrealistic goal, and neither does the new Federal Reserve chairman appointed by President Trump. I think those who are arguing that around 3 percent is the best anyone can hope for are attempting to shift the goalposts so that the president’s record in his second term is judged more generously.