For a few minutes on Thursday evening Donald Trump sounded like a refreshingly generic American president in the run-up to a midterm election. The economy is humming. America is winning the war in Iran. “We have the strongest and most powerful military by far,” he said. Could our long national reality show be coming to a close?
Of course not. All of the boasting was just a prelude to the big announcement. The Trump administration will be releasing long-suppressed intelligence “revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure,” Trump said. Our voting system is ripe for “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference,” he argued.
The details, as he presented them, were alarming. The Chinese government, starting in 2020, illicitly acquired election data on 220 million Americans. “This data loss presents an unprecedented election [data] security nightmare,” Trump said. It gets worse. The American deep state conspired to keep the Chinese meddling from the American public and the president himself, Trump claimed. China sought to influence prominent American journalists and business leaders to turn against Trump in 2020, Trump said the declassified documents showed. Raw intelligence collected by the FBI, Trump claimed, showed that China even tried to manufacture illegal ballots in 2020 for Trump’s general election opponent, Joe Biden.
Is this a real scandal? In 2021, Biden’s National Intelligence Council released an assessment that explicitly stated: “We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election.”
