Opinion: What Trump didn’t say about election interference

After six years of asserting the 2020 presidential election was stolen and repeatedly claiming he would produce the evidence, President Trump gave it his best shot Thursday night. It didn’t go well. His speech was universally panned for regurgitating what we already knew and not providing any proof of election interference.

But the worst part is the U.S. intelligence he so frequently mentioned largely disagrees with him. Here’s what Trump didn’t say.

Election influence and election interference are two different things that Trump often conflates. To be fair, so do many in the media. They are not the same. The National Intelligence Council goes to great pains to explain the difference. Election influence by foreign governments and nonstate actors includes activities such as “public statements and foreign assistance efforts, to sanctions and other economic pressure such as boycotts, to covert or clandestine efforts such as covert messaging and recruiting agents of influence.”

In other words, election influence seeks to change your mind so that you will change your vote.

Election interference, by contrast, is when a foreign government or nonstate actor “attempts or takes actions to target the technical aspects of elections — including voter registration, casting and counting ballots, and reporting results.”

Trump frequently asserts there is election influence and then implies election interference. There is ample evidence of foreign nations engaging in election influence, but there is little to no evidence of actual election interference.

Ironically, perhaps no one has done more to directly influence foreign elections than Trump himself. He frequently encourages foreign voters to elect the candidate he prefers. Trump even sent Vice President JD Vance to Hungary to campaign openly for the country’s prime minister, Victor Orbán, who lost by a wide margin.

Just imagine the outrage we’d see from Trump if China’s President Xi Jinping or Russia’s President Vladimir Puntin sent his second in command to the United States to campaign for Joe Biden in 2020 or Kamala Harris in 2024.

What U.S. intelligence has concluded. Trump has declassified and posted numerous reports and emails from the U.S. intelligence community that raised past concerns about foreign actors, especially China, interfering in the 2020 elections. For example, in January 2020 the National Intelligence Council said, “We conclude that U.S. adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as nonstate groups, have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure for the 2020 presidential election.”

However, Trump conveniently failed to mention the National Intelligence Council’s March 2021 post-election assessment. The Council’s first “key judgment” says, “We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 U.S. elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”

The Council did find that Russia engaged in election influence operations, especially “denigrating Biden.” But the Council concluded, “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.” You heard the opposite message in Trump’s election security speech. 

The fact is that it would be very difficult to interfere in U.S. elections in any widespread or ongoing effort. That’s because U.S. elections are highly decentralized. As the National Conference of State Legislatures explains, “County or municipal officials typically do the rubber-meets-the-road functions of running an election, but the state and federal government each have roles, too.” Even if a foreign actor could hack into one election system, that would have no effect on thousands of others.

What still concerns the intelligence community? “We assess that adversaries could make false claims about their ability to manipulate the U.S. election infrastructure as part of a broader effort to undermine confidence in U.S. democratic processes.”

That assessment, which comes from one of Trump’s recently declassified documents, goes on to say, “Much of the voting public probably knows little about the process of administering U.S. elections, which could allow false narratives to gain traction.”

Yes, it could. But it isn’t foreign adversaries making “false claims about their ability to manipulate” U.S. elections; it is Trump himself. Trump is the one saying voters can’t trust U.S. elections because they have been compromised by foreign actors. It’s a very odd message to be sending out at a time when Republicans will need all the votes they can get in the coming midterm election.

When the intelligence community published its concerns in January 2020, its biggest fear was that foreign adversaries would try to convince U.S. voters they can’t trust the accuracy and fairness of our elections. Who would have thought that the one doing that job for them would be President Trump?

Merrill Matthews is the Texas state chair of Our Republican Legacy.

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