Here are the 10 ways Trump shot himself in the foot last night.
Donald Trump's speech to the nation was not only bashed as a "sore loser" rehash, it proved the opposite of what he hoped to prove.
Donald Trump commandeered primetime last night to make the case that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Instead, he declassified the receipts proving it wasn’t.
I have to say that yesterday evening’s speech was one of the more remarkable instances of presidential “blowback” we have ever seen. Again and again, the president made sweeping claims and pointed Americans to data, documents, and a public record that proved the literal opposite of what he was saying. Trump shot himself in the foot repeatedly without realizing it.
In a roughly 30-minute address from the East Room (which major networks didn’t carry live), the president unveiled a trove of newly declassified intelligence documents that he claimed would expose a vast foreign plot against him and a “Deep State” conspiracy to bury it. What the documents actually show when you read them, in the government’s own words, is that the plot was minor, that the bigger foreign operation was run for him rather than against him, and that the national security professionals he spent the evening demonizing are the reason the 2020 election stayed secure.
Rarely has a president worked so hard to disprove his own case without even understanding how. Indeed, he handed his critics the evidence file. I’m going to walk you through what I wrote down last night as the TEN biggest claims that he tried to make… and how he proved the opposite.
ONE, Trump tried to prove that China “fought like hell” to steal the 2020 election. I really want you to key in on those words. He told the nation that Beijing “fought like hell” to meddle in the vote, citing what he described as long-suppressed intelligence about their plot to undermine the presidential election and Trump himself. He even read aloud from what he described as CIA documents showing Beijing would “leverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the US president” to reduce his vote count.
Instead, he released documents admitting China’s efforts were “low-level.” The assessment from the National Intelligence Officer for Cyber and the Director for Election Threat Analysis (now posted on the White House’s own website) says Beijing took “low-level, exploratory steps” to shape voter perceptions, and notes that even this was a minority view: it “differs from the IC’s judgment that Beijing has considered but not deployed influence efforts to affect the Presidential election.” The analysts assigned themselves “low-to-medium confidence.” The documents further assess that China deliberately avoided its “most aggressive options” because Beijing “wants to minimize the risk of blowback.” Whoever wrote his “fought like hell” remarks in the speech was hoping no one would go read the actual documents.
TWO, Trump implied that China stole data that could’ve affected the outcome. The centerpiece was his allegation of a Chinese hack of more than 200 million U.S. voter records, which the president portrayed as a smash-and-grab on American democracy itself, full of insinuation that this data represented the keys to the kingdom electorally.
His own documents show much of that data came from public websites… and that the Chinese apparently didn’t do anything with it. To be clear, this data was not the ballots themselves but the lists of people who are registered to vote, their addresses, etc. One of the declassified records states that voter registration information was downloaded from “U.S. commercial websites,” e.g. data brokers, the same type of “people search” websites you can go sign up for right now. This is the internet’s digital white pages. As election officials were quick to point out last night, voter rolls are largely public records in most states. If a foreign actor unlawfully scrapes that data, it’s unlawful, but it doesn’t touch a single ballot, a single tabulator, or a single result. The same document adds that the data from Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island “was downloaded by a Chinese actor on 14 January 2022.” Check that date again. January 2022. Fourteen months after Joe Biden won. And what did the Chinese do with this data to “upend” our elections? One of the declassified documents said Chinese officials conducted “public opinion analysis.”
THREE, Trump said the “Deep State” hid the Chinese plot from him. He cast himself as the last to know, as if personnel in the national security community deliberately tried to keep the information from him. He claimed outright that the “Deep State” intelligence community never informed the White House or Congress about this bombshell information.
The record shows he was briefed on Chinese meddling as far back as 2018 and even spoke about it publicly. The documents the White House released are the briefings. They were produced by his own administration’s analysts, during his own presidency, and delivered to his own White House. Even if the president didn’t actually read them, his team did. And I can personally attest that he was verbally briefed on the threats. Because I was one of the briefers. In fact, Trump was so taken with what we told him about foreign meddling that he made a speech about it to the United Nations. Unfortunately, he refused to talk about the countries we told him were interfering in elections to help his candidacy (Russia) and only wanted to warn about the countries that might not want to see him re-elected (China). What’s more, one of the main classified assessments underpinning Trump’s arguments last night — that he was kept in the dark by the spy community — was delivered to the president and congressional leadership on January 7, 2021, while Trump still occupied the Oval Office.
FOUR, Trump attempted to stitch the disparate facts together to prove his candidacy was hurt by the interference. The framing of the evening was Trump-as-victim, showing that he was a president besieged by hostile powers and betrayed by his own government.
He revealed documents showing foreign actors actually worked to boost his candidacy, undermine his rival, and may have had help from inside Trump’s own movement. The most damning material in the release concerns Russia, not China. A National Intelligence Council product describes Putin and senior Russian officials personally “overseeing efforts by proxies” (including sanctioned agents) to “orchestrate a high-profile corruption scandal implicating former Vice President Biden and the Democratic Party at the peak of the 2020 US presidential campaign.” Their stated aim: “to defeat the former Vice President and ensure the President’s victory.” The documents note these narratives were advanced through “U.S. officials and other prominent persons,” through “documentary film releases via US and Ukrainian media outlets,” and that “U.S. persons are key to propagating these narratives.” Another assessment states flatly that “Kremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump’s candidacy on social media.” In other words, Trump declassified proof that the Kremlin ran a pro-Trump influence operation using American amplifiers that was far more significant in scope than any Chinese efforts.
FIVE, Trump went further and claimed that the “Deep State” not only hid all of this from him, but they hid it from the American people. It was a cover-up, he said, of catastrophic proportions. The documents, he insisted, had been hidden from him and from the American people.
The intelligence community published a public assessment five years ago, and last night’s “bombshells” were already included in it. On March 16, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence publicly released its declassified assessment, Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections. It disclosed Russia’s pro-Trump influence operation, Iran’s anti-Trump efforts, and the debate over China’s intentions, including the minority view Trump now brandishes as suppressed truth. Multiple documents in last night’s release explicitly reference it. Nothing Trump “revealed” differs in substance from what the American people were told in 2021. Trump’s team learned the hard way last night that you cannot expose a “cover-up” by basically linking to a press release that’s been sitting on the internet for half a decade.
SIX, Trump tried to make Americans believe voting in this country is not safe. Election security, he warned, “falls catastrophically short.” He claimed the newly released documents reveal “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” and warned that American voting systems are at risk of being “rigged and stolen.”
His own documents say the opposite in bold print. One declassified assessment states that vote tabulation systems “would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results,” noting the systems “are not connected to the Internet.” The March 2021 assessment’s very first key judgment found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process” — registration, ballot casting, tabulation, or reporting. So Trump held a primetime address to terrify voters about their election systems and then quietly linked to documents that certified those systems as sound.
SEVEN, Trump directed officials to investigate people inside the U.S. government who supposedly enabled these plots by hiding them from view. He threatened that heads would roll and that his administration would pursue prosecutions.
The material he released shows that the U.S. government “Deep State” successfully protected the elections — including Trump’s own campaign effort. If anyone owes anyone a thank-you note, Trump should be writing to the career intelligence officers who spent 2020 tracking and countering plots aimed at his campaign, Biden’s campaign, and the election writ large. Instead, the president publicly trashed them. But page by page, the documents he declassified show quite clearly how the U.S. government became aware of foreign interference and proactively kept it at bay. Indeed, the people Trump was excoriating were the very same people who discovered the plots against him and Biden, tracked them in real time, warned policymakers (including Trump), and briefed the public. China, Russia, and Iran all wanted to meddle, yet there is still no evidence a single vote was changed. That’s the opposite of a scandal; it’s a success story.
EIGTH, Trump warned about systemic “corruption” inside the U.S. government. He seemed to suggest that it was more than just a handful of individuals who were responsible for the claims he made last night.
The president inadvertently highlighted how all the election protection structures — that worked to protect democracy in 2020 — are being dismantled by him in 2026. Every page declassified last night exists because America built a serious election-defense architecture after 2016, including FBI election task forces, DHS infrastructure monitoring, ODNI fusion cells, and more. One of the major ironies of Trump’s speech is that he brought a spotlight back to the fact that he’s dismantled each of them. His team shut down the FBI election task force. His team has been breaking up the main DHS election defense agency. His team is in the process of gutting ODNI. And just last week, he purged the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission — the federal agency that helps states secure their voting systems. Put another way, the systemic “corruption” is being carried out by Trump himself, who is trying to cover the U.S. government’s eyes and ears to future election interference.
NINE, Trump tried to use the speech to justify the SAVE America Act. The speech was a primetime lobbying pitch for the stalled voter-ID bill he has made his singular legislative obsession, refusing to sign other legislation until it reaches his desk. He declared that the only reason anyone could oppose the bill is an intention to “cheat.”
But nothing in his own evidence has anything to do with voter ID. Not one document described a threat that a photo ID at a polling place would have stopped. The foreign influence operations, data scraping, and social media manipulation he described have nothing to do with voter ID. If Congress took the president’s evidence seriously, it would restore funding to the election-protection systems his administration is tearing down. That mismatch gave away the whole game last night. The SAVE America Act was never about the threat; rather, the threat was conjured to sell the bill, albeit very unconvincingly.
TEN, Trump hoped the night would suggest he was the rightful winner in 2020. That was the emotional core of the speech, and it’s the wound he cannot stop reopening, to the dismay of Republicans on Capitol Hill.
Instead, he reminded the world that he’s a sore loser, and he re-upped evidence about who actually tried to corrupt the 2020 election. By dragging the country back to 2020, Trump resurfaced the criminal allegations he’d rather bury. The recorded phone call pressuring Georgia’s secretary of state to “find” 11,780 votes; his own Attorney General, Bill Barr, telling investigators the stolen-election claims were baseless; the dozens of courts that threw out his challenges; the fake electors scheme; January 6th. The most extensive, best-documented attempt to interfere with the 2020 election wasn’t run from Beijing or Moscow. It was run from the White House by the man who stood in the East Room last night, six years later, still litigating his loss on national television. Social media was flooded with those examples before, during, and after Trump’s speech. It was as bad of a “self own” as you could manufacture.
Trump wanted last night to be the opening argument for overturning the past and pre-litigating the future, a predicate for crying foul in November. What he delivered was a confession dressed up poorly as an exposé. He showed us that the foreign plots against him were minor and defeated, and he reminded us that the big one was run on his behalf… that the “Deep State” saved the election… and that the loudest election saboteur of 2020 was the man at the podium.
Donald Trump aimed for vindication last night. But he shot himself in both feet.
Your friend, in defiance,
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