Donald Trump’s campaign to discredit the integrity of the crucial midterm legislative elections in November has taken off. After years of sowing doubts about mail-in voting, alleged voter fraud by undocumented immigrants, widespread rigging of counting machines, and a Democratic conspiracy to end democracy—without conclusive evidence according to the judiciary—last night the president gave a prime-time speech to the nation that will further fuel his supporters’ distrust in the election results.
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With a hoarse voice and without taking his eyes off the teleprompter, he announced the declassification of “verified” U.S. intelligence documents about alleged Chinese interference in the 2020 elections, which had been “hidden” by a “deep state.” The documents can be consulted on the official White House website, although there are various classified sections and often they do not match his version or show non-definitive conclusions from U.S. intelligence.
According to the president, beyond Chinese interference, which was the focus of most of his speech, the files also demonstrate the “vulnerability” of the U.S. electoral infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and vote counting. Furthermore, the president claimed that around 278,000 non-citizens are registered to vote with the connivance of the Democrats, a figure derived from a study commissioned by his administration to a private company that contradicts studies published by major research centers.
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These are just the most relevant accusations from the long list cited by Trump, which aligns with many conspiracy theories he has been promoting for years. The president, whose party is on track to lose at least the House of Representatives and possibly the Senate in November, and who faces his worst unpopularity ratings according to polls, is preparing the ground to declare the upcoming legislative elections invalid—as he did in 2020 with the presidential election.
“Our purpose in releasing this information is not to weaken confidence in the elections, but to earn that confidence by confronting vulnerabilities and correcting them quickly,” Trump assured in a pre-recorded speech that some of the country’s main TV networks, such as CNN, NBC, and ABC, refused to broadcast live upon learning its content. However, everything he said will serve to weaken confidence in the elections.
First, Trump stated that since the 2020 election cycle, “the People’s Republic of China carried out what is considered the largest infiltration of electoral data in history, allowing the illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter records.” This information “includes names, addresses, phone numbers, political affiliation, and other sensitive data necessary to register voters,” he added, which “represents an unprecedented nightmare for electoral security.”
The president claims a “shadow government” hid information about Chinese rigging from him when he was president
Additionally, according to Trump, this information was hidden by “members of the so-called Deep State,” who concealed the information “from both the president and the American people.” The president claimed that intelligence was aware of the voter record breach in 2020, when he was still president, but an organized group of officials ensured he did not find out, creating a “shadow government.” In his version, “tens of millions of voter records from 18 states” were “bought, stolen, or hacked by China.”
The Republican added that intelligence concluded China has the capability to “rig” elections. Citing an intelligence report, he said “voter registration databases, electronic voter rolls, and other official election websites are the most vulnerable to exploitation” and “adversaries could use that access to alter electoral processes within the U.S.”
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In fact, he directly accused China of “conspiring to rig the 2020 Venezuelan elections” in favor of Nicolás Maduro with “methods to digitally alter the vote total in a way that could not be detected even by an audit, no matter how thorough,” and added that these methods could be used against him in November. “This is a cyber threat aimed at the very heart of our democracy,” he concluded.
Trump claims China has the ability to “digitally alter” vote counting and already applied it in Venezuela
In the last decade, intelligence agencies have demonstrated attempts by countries like China, Russia, or Iran to influence elections through propaganda operations, hacking, and leaks. However, no evidence has ever been presented that vote counts have been manipulated or altered by domestic or international actors.
Intelligence agencies concluded, in a report declassified in 2021, that China had considered influencing the election outcome but decided not to do so to avoid harming its relations with the U.S. However, Trump has cited a minority opinion from the National Cybersecurity Intelligence Office, which then assessed that China had indeed taken “at least some steps to undermine former President Trump’s reelection chances, mainly through social media and official public statements and media.”
In this regard, Trump has claimed that Beijing worked in 2018 to influence the midterm elections, as well as the 2020 presidential election, through other media-related methods. According to him, the strategy included contacts with business leaders to “turn them against the president.” Additionally, “the Chinese government also sought to identify American journalists who had published negative information about the president and paid them large sums of money to write even more negative articles.” And, as if that were not enough, “China’s activities even included an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden.”
The Republican alleges Beijing tried to turn business leaders against him and bought journalists for bad press
Months before losing the 2020 presidential election to Biden, Trump also fueled all kinds of conspiracy theories about the electoral process. When the ballots confirmed he had lost, he called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to ask him to “find” 11,780 votes, the number he lacked to win the state and, with its 16 electoral votes, also nationally, where he had lost by 7 million votes. Raffensperger refused, stating that the ballots had undergone several reviews and all agreed that Biden had won. Trump continued his offensive and filed several legal challenges, which were rejected by the courts.
When he ran out of legal options, Trump decided to give a speech on January 6, 2021, at the Ellipse south of the White House, in which he encouraged his supporters to march to the Capitol. There, protesters, activists, and members of far-right militias stormed the seat of democracy intending to prevent Biden’s certification as president. A full-scale insurrection attempt, which led to thousands of convictions, whom Trump pardoned when he returned to power in 2024.
That attempt at electoral manipulation earned him a criminal indictment in 2023, the year he surrendered to authorities and had his famous mugshot taken, which he later used during the campaign to portray himself as a victim. In the months leading up to the presidential election, he again stirred the specter of electoral fraud, but when he won at the polls, he said it had been a clean election because his victory had been “too big to be rigged.” After his triumph, the special prosecutor appointed for the insurrection case, Jack Smith, dropped the charges despite the evidence, arguing that the Department of Justice’s policy is not to prosecute a sitting president.
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