Last night I tried to watch Trump’s speech on China and election security. I made it about four minutes in before I gave up and watched a YouTube video on how to make a strawberry rhubarb galette instead (Try it, it looks delicious). This should tell you more about this speech than the speech itself. A sitting president could not hold my attention for the length of a pastry tutorial. I watched the replay this afternoon out of obligation, and nearly bailed out of that one too.
Trump’s claim is that China illegally acquired 220 million American voter files, and that it represents an unprecedented security threat and Deep State cover-up. It’s mostly hogwash. Voter registration data in this U.S. is largely public and/or commercially available. Anyone with a credit card can buy it. Why in the world would China go through the trouble of hacking to get the info if they could just use the money Americans give them by purchasing billions of dollars worth of cheap crap to buy it? Only people who don’t pay attention to how voter rolls work would be convinced of Trump’s China voter hacking conspiracy.
I assume, and you should too, that every country that needs something from us runs some version of an election influence operation. Our own intelligence agencies acknowledge this going back years, including in reports that were declassified under Trump’s own watch. This is like shouting that the Sun rising in the East is a Chinese trick.
I also don’t think China is specifically targeting Trump. Obviously I could be wrong as I don’t have access to any intelligence information. But, from being a consumer of news over the last 50 years I know enough to know that China plays a long game. Their interest in American elections is not a personal vendetta against one man, it is a standing interest in shaping our policies so they are favorable to them. China also knows that Congress writes the laws. The president sets tone and can issue dreaded executive orders, but the legislative machinery that actually governs trade, tariffs, and the regulatory environment China cares about sits with the House and Senate. A regime that thinks in centuries is not losing sleep over who occupies the White House for four years.
I am not sure Trump has an end-game here beyond generating a headline. If anything, speeches like this one are making him harder to hear. He is increasingly becoming background noise, the political equivalent of a car alarm that has been going off so long the neighborhood has stopped paying attention. It’ll never happen, but if Trump spoke less he might be heard more.
I say all of this as someone who voted for the man. It’s been painful to watch him royally screw up this second term. The immigration crackdown is the one unambiguous positive of this term, and even that has been executed with all the finesse of a man trying to defuse a bomb by wildly cutting every exposed wire he sees. The policy was right. The execution has been so chaotic his opponents are able to turn it slightly negative. Almost all his wins in this term carry so much self-inflicted damage they’re almost losses.
I have spent this term telling myself that as bad as it’s been, it still beats the alternative. A Harris administration would have meant more ground lost on free speech, more medical mutilation of children in the name of transgenderism, erosion of the Second Amendment, and economic self-destruction dressed up as climate policy. I am starting to question, however, how much of her agenda would have actually survived a GOP majority Congress. Trump had a compliant Congress, and instead of using it to build something durable, he is wasting political capital on nonsense. He’s Trump Quixote tipping at election fraud.
This is what happens when we elect a carnival barker. I didn’t vote for him in 2016 but was forced to vote for him in 2020 (which I do think has legitimate questions about that election that have never been investigated) and in 2024. I never thought I’d crave the president to be a normal politician again. But here I am.
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