In their book Regime Change, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan offer a telling account of the way President Donald Trump deals with a bad news cycle this term: As the White House debated how to manage the fallout from its chaotic slashing of the federal government last year, they determined that they needed “distractions.” There were two proposals: they could release videos of Special Counsel Robert Hur’s interview with a confused Joe Biden. Or they could announce the grand opening of camps in Guantánamo Bay to detain migrants.
“They opted for announcing Guantánamo,” Haberman and Swan wrote. “There was no better counter for a screwup than an outrage.”
Thursday night, Trump dipped back into the formula. With his approval rating stalled at record lows, the war with Iran escalating and the cost of living continuing to weigh on voters, he used a 24-minute address from the White House’s East Room to revive his favorite political grievance: the 2020 election he lost.
Trump spent the opening minutes ticking through his administration’s claimed accomplishments. “We are doing great,” he said, sounding hoarse. Then, after a deep exhale, sounding as though he were about to leap from a diving board, Trump announced the release of declassified intelligence that he said exposes “shocking vulnerabilities” in American elections.
His most dramatic claim was that China had obtained voter-registration information concerning roughly 220 million Americans. If accurate, it would be a serious data-security breach. It would not, however, establish that China changed a vote, manipulated a voting machine, or altered the result of the 2020 election. Nothing in the declassified material appears to support such a conclusion.
As The Atlantic’s Shane Harris pointed out before the speech, Trump’s own intelligence community presented a classified report to him in January 2021, which showed that China did not seek to meddle in the 2020 election, having assessed that neither a Trump nor Biden win was worth the risk of interfering in any real way. That intelligence report, which was declassified in March 2021, did find that China “probably also continued longstanding efforts to gather information on US voters” in order to “inform its efforts to influence US policy toward China.”
In his speech, Trump also accused China of devising ways to undermine his reputation among Americans. “They wanted to just make you sound like your president wasn’t so hot,” Trump said, referring to himself in the third person, “when actually your president has done a great job.”
John Solomon, a conservative media commentator who joined the White House earlier this year to help review and declassify documents related to U.S. elections, was questioned by reporters outside the White House on Thursday night. When asked if there was any intelligence that proved the 2020 election was rigged, he replied, “Not yet.”
That distinction—between evidence of a vulnerability and evidence of a stolen election—was absent from Trump’s address. But the speech gave him a fresh outrage through which to revisit an old defeat, accuse his own government of betrayal and force the press to spend the evening adjudicating his claims.
