Back in January of this year, President Trump warned Republicans during a retreat that if they lose the upcoming midterms, Democrats will impeach him. With his speech on election interference on Thursday, it seems that Trump is putting another piece in place to meddle with the results of the midterm elections where Democrats are projected to win a majority in the House.
During the speech, Trump stated that he was declassifying intelligence reports that found foreign election interference by China during the 2020 election, which he lost to former President Biden. He also insisted that US elections have been susceptible to “hacking, manipulation, and corruption.”
A review of the documents does not support much that we didn’t already know about China’s efforts to influence our elections and it revealed virtually nothing new or interesting about our election infrastructure’s vulnerabilities.
This is unsurprising given that intelligence agencies have consistently found that foreign influence has been mostly limited to attempting to influence public opinion through tactics like social media campaigns rather than altering vote totals. A 2021 report by the US National Intelligence Council concluded that, “We have 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,” and the newly released documents do not contain evidence that this was false.
The documents that were released by the Trump administration also contradict the president’s insistence that our election infrastructure is hopelessly flawed with one document stating, “We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results.”
But as with many other instances of Trump making wildly false claims, the point was not to prove genuine concerns for the good of our country – it was to provide pretexts for his agenda; in this case, presenting insufficient evidence of election vulnerabilities to provide a reason for him to question the legitimacy of the midterm elections and reject the results.
This would be far from the first time that Trump has attempted to manufacture a crisis to allow him to cite an emergency when he oversteps his presidential powers. This same crying wolf strategy is the one that he used to impose universal tariffs – a move that the Supreme Court later ruled was illegal.
Trump’s tariffs were counterproductive and economically illiterate but the damage that they produced does not compare to what would occur if the president attempted to hijack the elections – this would be a catastrophic attack on the foundation of our democracy and if successful, would finally complete our transformation into an authoritarian state.
Paradoxically, Trump cited a plot by the dictatorial Maduro regime to manipulate vote totals in Venezuelan elections as a motivation for his push to secure our own voting systems. The severity of Trump’s ambitions requires that we do not mince words. Trump is attempting to gain influence over our elections in much the same way that Maduro and other dictators have exercised over theirs.
Control over voting systems is not the only tactic that Trump is borrowing from dictators like Maduro. During the speech he also called on Congress to pass his SAVE America Act, which would disenfranchise millions of voters by making it more difficult to vote, similar to Venezuelan elections under Maduro, which had short registration deadlines and few places to register.
The comparisons to an authoritarian approach to elections do not stop there. Just like Maduro liked to station security forces at polling sites to intimidate voters, Trump has spoken about stationing ICE agents at ours in a transparent attempt to intimidate voters and limit participation.
There is an important reason why ABC, NBC, and CNN chose to not air Trump’s speech on their primary platforms. Trump’s ridiculous and unsubstantiated claims about the integrity of our elections are actively working to alter our expectations of what is to come, softening the blow when he decides to move against our elections.
Overcoming these priming efforts by the president will be an important test of our democracy and whether Americans can unite to protect one of our most cherished institutions.
Rafael Perez is a columnist for the Southern California News Group.