President Trump addressed the nation Thursday night in what the White House billed as an “earth-shattering announcement” on election integrity, accusing China of orchestrating what he called “the largest compromise of election data in history.”
An uncomfortable looking Trump grimaced through the address and twice raised his voice to shout demands that Congress immediately pass the so-called “SAVE America Act,” dropping his arms to his sides and hunching his shoulders in a stiff, lurching pose reminiscent of Boris Karloff’s Frankenstein’s monster.
In the speech, Trump claimed Beijing illicitly acquired 220 million U.S. voter files—including names, addresses, phone numbers, and party affiliations—in an operation beginning during the 2020 election cycle, and alleged China assigned a dedicated “data exploitation unit” to the effort. He further charged that intelligence officials within the “Deep State” actively suppressed and downplayed the extent of China’s election meddling, keeping it hidden from both him and the American public.
According to Trump, China’s motive was to prevent his reelection because Beijing “knew I was wise to them,” citing his tariffs on Chinese goods and military buildup as reasons for concern in Beijing. He also alleged that raw FBI intelligence gathered in 2020, later buried by “rogue bureaucrats,” showed China had attempted to manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden, and that dozens of CIA and NSA reports on China’s election targeting were kept out of his presidential briefings. A set of declassified documents supporting these claims was posted to whitehouse.gov Thursday night.
In a companion event earlier the same day, clearly designed to magnify the alleged threats to the mid-term elections, Secretary of State Marco Rubio and other cabinet officials addressed a group of “important officials from 65 nations.” At it, Rubio led with a speech lumping all left-leaning groups in at least Europe, South America, and North America together as “Communists,” “terrorists and pro-terrorists” who must be shut down. They were all known, according to Rubio’s evidence-free presentation, to be controlled by Iran, China, and/or that grandma of terrorists in the Western Hemisphere, Cuba. The United States was leading a campaign to shut them all down with sanctions and seizures of assets, Treasury Secretary Bessent promised.
