Voters, it appears, have a more dyspeptic view; a Washington Post-Ipsos poll published earlier in the day found the President’s approval rating to be floundering at thirty-seven per cent, where it was in April. More alarming for Trump, the poll suggested a weakening of his base; just fifteen per cent, a new low, said they “approve strongly” of his performance. And, while Trump asserted that the United States is “winning big in Iran,” poll respondents begged to differ, with only twenty-nine per cent approving of his conduct of the war. Trump’s rating on his handling of the economy was not much better, at thirty-three per cent.
Those anemic numbers help explain the President’s mania for changing the subject to election fraud—laying the groundwork to explain away any losses in November, or, worse, something closer to what Himes warned about. In advance of the speech, Trump had touted “really, really big news.” The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, back from her maternity leave, teased that the findings “will shock you.” And yet the supposed revelations—padded by newly declassified, if still heavily redacted, documents—were far less explosive than Trump claimed. The bait and switch was less surprising than it was reminiscent of former Attorney General Pam Bondi’s bogus binders full of recycled material about Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump accused China of “the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China’s illicit acquisition of two hundred and twenty million U.S. voter files,” which he called an “unprecedented election-security nightmare.” He failed to mention that these voter files are often publicly available, that China’s gathering of this data has long been known (the information was presented to Trump before he left office), and that, most important, there is an absence of any evidence of tampering with the actual election results, by China or any foreign actor. An April, 2020, redacted assessment by the National Intelligence Council concluded that “Chinese intelligence officials analyzed multiple US states’ election voter registration data,” but did so in order “to conduct public opinion analysis on the 2020 US general election,” not to change the outcome. A 2021 analysis of foreign threats to the election, prepared during the Trump Administration and declassified after he left office, found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.” China, it said, “considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US Presidential election.”
Trump said a “stunning investigation by the Department of Homeland Security” had uncovered approximately two hundred and seventy-eight thousand noncitizens registered to vote, largely in four states. The methodology of this tally is disputed, but, more to the point, and unmentioned by Trump, the evidence of noncitizens actually voting is minimal. A February, 2026, analysis by the Bipartisan Policy Center found that “noncitizen registration is already rare, and noncitizen voting is even less common.” The group found that, in many cases of supposed registration by noncitizens, “further review shows the individual is in fact a citizen, and they were only flagged due to clerical errors or outdated records.” As to noncitizens casting ballots, the conservative Heritage Foundation uncovered only seventy-seven instances of noncitizen voting between 1999 and 2023.
One of the weirder turns in Trump’s speech was his claim that he had been misled about election interference, during his first term, by his own intelligence community, “members of the deep state” who “worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling, covering it up from both the President and the American people, like nobody thought was possible.” Officials “responsible for sounding the alarm” about China’s acquisition of voter data, Trump said, “instead kept the information secret and hidden. They did not disclose to me as President or to anyone else.” One e-mail, he said, showed that intelligence analysts “deliberately massaged the Presidential daily briefing to withhold information regarding Chinese activities related to the election.” The e-mail in question, from November 20, 2020, outlined something less than a grand conspiracy. It stated, “We have deliberately massaged our one pending PDB to avoid any direct links to the election.” Even assuming the most malign interpretation of that e-mail, the notion that Trump was the victim of his own intelligence community is a strange claim, given that his then director of National Intelligence, John Ratcliffe, under whose purview the President’s Daily Brief fell, now serves as his C.I.A. director. The declassified documents show a roiling debate within the intelligence community over China’s interest in influencing the election, with a minority saying that the matter should be taken more seriously. They fall short of proving Trump’s claims of a deep-state coverup.
