How Trump’s address bluntly aimed at destabilizing the US electoral system

Donald Trump used the imprimatur of the presidency and United States intelligence agencies to try to undermine confidence in American elections in a presidential address on Thursday that seemed bluntly aimed at laying the groundwork for further destabilizing the electoral system before November’s midterm elections.

In his address from the East Room at the White House, Trump attempted to give the impression that his administration had uncovered new bombshell findings about vulnerabilities in the US’s election system. China, he claimed, had illicitly acquired voter information on 220 million Americans (many states allow anyone to buy voter roll information; Trump did not say the means by which the nation acquired the data). He claimed that China interfered in other ways to undermine his 2020 campaign and that the information had been suppressed by intelligence officials.

Trump’s claims about election vulnerabilities were already investigated by intelligence officials, who concluded with high confidence in 2021 that China “did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US presidential election”. A minority view included in that public report by the the national intelligence officer for cyber argued: “China took at least some steps to undermine former President Trump’s reelection chances, primarily through social media and official public statements and media.” But even the dissenting view concluded “we have no information suggesting China tried to interfere with election processes”.

The White House released a tranche of formerly classified materials on Thursday attempting to try to undercut that conclusion. But the documents were heavily redacted, making it hard to assess what exactly they said. At least some of the documents released on Thursday also appeared to undercut the idea that China intended to interfere in the 2020 election. Conducting a review of the documents, CNN concluded there wasn’t much new in them. Instead of offering smoking-gun evidence, the release seemed to be a return to a classic Trump strategy of flooding the zone with information in an attempt to muddy the waters and make uncertain what was true.

Trump also claimed that FBI officials had investigated a voter-canvassing operation in Muskegon, Michigan, in which canvassers admitted they had submitted voter-registration applications with fake names. While it’s not known why the FBI did not file charges, the incident did not result in illegitimate ballots being cast and was caught by the local clerk. The incident has been trumpeted by Michigan Republicans and the far-right website the Gateway Pundit for years.

Trump said the Department of Homeland Security had identified more than 270,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls in four states (there are more than 211 million people registered to vote in the US), without saying anything about how the agency went about going about identifying the noncitizens.

The US constitution gives Trump no power over elections, instead giving it to the states. But perhaps the most sinister line of his speech on Thursday came towards the end, when Trump said his administration would be taking more action to try to take control over elections. The Department of Homeland Security, he said, was holding a briefing tomorrow to discuss vulnerabilities in state voting systems and would order states to remove noncitizens from the rolls.