Why Donald Trump Talks So Much About Foreign Election Interference
After the exposure of Russia’s attempts to help elect Donald Trump in the 2016 Presidential election, Trump himself joined a bipartisan push to shore up confidence in American democracy. In 2018, he issued an executive order directing U.S. spy agencies, after each federal election, to conduct a formal assessment of any covert efforts by foreign powers to sway the outcome or tamper with the vote. The next year, he signed legislation enshrining that mandate into law. The law further required that the director of National Intelligence provide that classified assessment to Congress and, within sixty days, share its findings with the public “to the greatest extent possible consistent with the protection of sources and methods.”
The public versions made for interesting reading. A declassified and partly redacted assessment put together after the 2022 midterms found that China had “tacitly approved” efforts to sway a handful of races, against both Democrats and Republicans, including an online campaign “covertly denigrating a named U.S. Senator online using inauthentic accounts.” (That was almost certainly Senator Marco Rubio, an outspoken China hawk who is now the Secretary of State.) The assessment also said that Iran had “considered distributing propaganda, developing and employing ‘troll teams’ on social media platforms, and establishing front news agencies to interact with undisclosed media outlets in the United States,” some of these efforts probably guided by the objective of “weakening US support for Israel.” Finally, it found that Russia sought “to denigrate the Democratic Party,” likely in part to “reduce US support for Ukraine.”
Yet the disclosures, released in 2023, were, all in all, reassuring. China saw little advantage, no matter which party came out ahead, and engaged in only sloppy, halfhearted online propaganda. (Rubio cruised to reëlection.) Iran was largely preoccupied with attempts to meddle elsewhere. (People familiar with the matter told me that Iran was focussed on the 2022 Israeli elections.) And, from Russia, intelligence agencies “did not detect concerted efforts to shape outcomes in specific races,” or “hack and leak operations, despite the collection of some potentially compromising material.” Although intelligence agencies had uncovered these scattered operations to influence voters, they had found no evidence of significant attempts to alter vote counts.
In his second term, however, President Trump has evidently declined to follow the law that he signed in his first. Despite the statute, neither Tulsi Gabbard, the first director of National Intelligence in Trump’s second term, nor Bill Pulte, the acting director Trump named to succeed her, ever released a declassified version of the post-2024 assessment delivered to Congress. It is unclear if Jay Clayton, who was confirmed last Tuesday as the new director of National Intelligence, still might. But the same law requires the director of National Intelligence to start providing the congressional intelligence committees with formal written assessments of potential election threats at least a hundred and eighty days before federal elections; with fewer than a hundred days remaining before the 2026 midterms, the Trump Administration has yet to do so. (The Office of the Director of National Intelligence did not respond to questions for this article.)
Instead, Trump announced this summer that he would personally deliver his own assessment of the threats to American elections, starting with a prime-time address last month from the White House. Trump has now spent a decade pushing discredited claims about the corruption and unreliability of American voting, including the preposterous assertion that Venezuela had somehow secretly rigged voting machines to cost him reëlection in 2020. Without the legally mandated assessments from career analysts at intelligence agencies, there were few limits on what he might say. Would he tell voters to shun the Democrats because some shadowy foreign adversary was scheming to elect them, or cherry-pick classified reporting to claim that deep vulnerabilities in the voting systems of certain states required emergency federal intervention? Would the loyalists he picked to head the Central Intelligence Agency and the Federal Bureau of Investigation—John Ratcliffe and Kash Patel—stand beside him?
Trump’s own self-absorption may have tripped him up. Instead of using his address to discuss present-tense threats, he mostly perseverated about his 2020 loss and recycled debunked claims. He overplayed three-year-old intelligence (hinted at in the assessment released after the 2022 election) that China had collected publicly available data about voters, implausibly argued that intelligence officials had conspired in a coverup to hurt him, and directed viewers to a trove of newly declassified documents that mostly undermined his own assertions. Fox News immediately distanced itself from his assertions. An anchor declared that the network “has not seen that evidence yet and is not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the President’s statement and claims,” and Fox almost completely dropped the matter. Republican lawmakers, when questioned by journalists, mostly ran from the subject. Still, if Trump’s fearmongering was inept, his intentions were clear: he was unmistakably trying to distort classified intelligence in order to manipulate American voters.
Real threats seem to receive much less of Trump’s attention. Intelligence officials and independent experts have consistently maintained that it would be virtually impossible for a foreign power to meaningfully tamper with the counting of ballots—much less to do so without detection. And midterms also generally arouse less interest among foreign adversaries than Presidential contests, which have more direct consequences for U.S. foreign policy. But covert foreign influence—secretive troll farms, hack-and-leaks, or viral deepfakes—remains a growth industry. The easy, and increasingly convincing, fakery of artificial intelligence has arguably supercharged it. Swinging relatively few voters can change the outcome of state or district elections, especially in close races or small electorates. This year, a handful of such electorates will likely decide control of the Senate: Iowa has about two million voters, Maine about a million, and Alaska about six hundred thousand.
By the summer of 2024, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, through its specialized Foreign Malign Influence Center, was providing periodic briefings to journalists about any potentially significant covert influence or interference operations from foreign governments that U.S. spies had detected. The Justice Department, in parallel, had filed an eye-popping criminal complaint charging that, through a front company, Russia secretly funded and directed a handful of pro-Trump online influencers, reportedly including Tim Pool and Benny Johnson. (The influencers said that they had no knowledge of the Russian involvement and took no direction from Russia.) And, by Election Day, the intelligence agencies had issued at least five notifications warning the public of information operations by Russia and Iran. But, as Trump took office, his Administration dismantled both the Foreign Malign Influence Center and a complementary F.B.I. task force. These days, no one (aside from the President himself, in his prime-time address) is briefing journalists, and, given the Justice Department’s apparent priorities, no one should expect to read another juicy federal indictment about what the Russians, Chinese, or Iranians may be plotting for the midterms.
After Russia’s attempts to exploit social-media networks in 2016, some tech companies also started trying to monitor and police this kind of underhanded meddling. Many appear to have scaled back these efforts following years of complaints from the Trump Administration and its conservative allies that the companies’ warnings about foreign-influence schemes reflected a bias against the right. David Salvo, a managing director at the Institute for Strategic Dialogue who tracks the efforts of authoritarian states to subvert democracy, told me, “The whole censorship-industrial-complex narrative has really deterred companies in the tech industry from monitoring that information ecosystem.” Yet, with the government silent, we are more dependent than ever on private companies—Microsoft may remain the most diligent—to warn voters about covert foreign attempts to manipulate them.
Iran, now at war with the U.S., has the strongest incentive to try to meddle in the midterms, and it has a history of such attempts. In the summer before the 2024 election, Iranian hackers tried to leak potentially embarrassing material stolen from the e-mail accounts of people around the Trump campaign. Major news organizations, unimpressed by the contents and aware of the successful Russian hack-and-leak in 2016, all passed on the dossier. Researchers who follow foreign-influence operations say that they expected Iran, at the very least, to try similar tactics this year, in one or more close congressional races. But in his speech Trump barely mentioned Iran (or Russia, which has historically posed the biggest threat); he focussed almost exclusively on China and Venezuela.
Representative Jim Himes, the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee, told me that he had seen the post-election intelligence assessment turned over to Congress before Trump’s Inauguration, and that it contained no “blockbuster” evidence of any foreign enemy’s subversion. (It presumably discussed the Russian operation described in the 2024 indictment, but that had been exposed before the election.) Himes said he suspected that Trump had held back the release of a declassified version to the public in part because 2024 had been “a very good year” for him and his party, and he didn’t want to raise any questions about that vote’s integrity. But Trump might also have withheld the assessment because “nothing about the reporting on 2024 substantiates the President’s case that either China or Venezuela was interfering in our elections.”
Blocking the release of the intelligence assessment, though, also reduces the transparency around government efforts to protect elections, further undermining public confidence. And holding back the required preëlection assessments by career intelligence analysts ahead of this fall’s midterms has left more room for Trump to cast doubt on election results by selectively, or even deceptively, spinning the still-classified intelligence. The midterms seem increasingly likely to deliver a repudiation of both his Presidency and his party, and his ham-fisted speech in July may have been only the beginning of his efforts to discredit those results before they come in. Himes told me, “Remember January 6th. He doesn’t need to convince forty per cent of the public that our elections are crooked. He just needs to convince a fairly small percentage who are willing to do terrible things.”
It is unclear if anyone could take the Administration to court over its failure to fulfill its legal obligations. But, last month, a bipartisan majority of the House Intelligence Committee adopted a provision in an annual authorization bill that would reduce the funding of the Office of the Director of National Intelligence by five per cent unless it submits the overdue assessments, suggesting that the measure has a decent chance of passing in both chambers. (The committee also asked for other material about potential foreign interference in elections going back to 2016.)
The damage to the government’s credibility may be harder to repair. It is easy to imagine a covert foreign-influence operation that might actually threaten to change the outcome of an election—a viral deepfake that tars a candidate in the final days of a close race, for example, or a well-timed hack-and-leak operation that mixes a few fraudulent e-mails among mostly authentic ones. Recent history suggests that the only effective counter to such meddling is a public statement alerting voters to the deception, by some credibly neutral, nonpartisan authority. The acute polarization of American politics in recent decades has made that exceedingly difficult. The fear of appearing partisan reportedly led President Barack Obama to refrain from warning voters about the full extent of Russia’s efforts to elect Trump until after Trump won the election. Trump, in contrast, seems to feel no compunction at all about exploiting the spectre of foreign interference as a political weapon, while at the same time portraying the intelligence agencies that might sniff out a real plot as part of some “deep state” conspiracy against him.
Suppose U.S. spies detect a genuine, well-executed covert influence operation by the Chinese or Iranians that threatens to decide the outcome of a close Senate race, or even the 2028 Presidential contest. After Trump’s partisan speech last month, if his Administration tried to warn voters, would anyone believe it? Every intelligence assessment on the subject released since 2016 has maintained that what adversaries like Russia, China, and Iran seek most of all is simply to sow as much doubt as possible about American democracy. In that, they have an ally in the White House. ♦