Trump's new election lie: Why China is suddenly being blamed for his 2020 defeat

Historic polling low: How Trump plans to save the midterms with a risky distraction tactic

Merkel's mobile phone and CIA coups: The bitter double standards behind Trump's new China accusations

In the summer of 2026, Donald Trump's political back is against the wall. Faced with historic lows in the polls and looming losses for the Republicans in the upcoming midterms, the US president resorts to a tried-and-tested rhetorical device: the narrative of the stolen 2020 election. But this time, he presents the country with a new main culprit. China is alleged to have stolen the data of 220 million US voters on an unprecedented scale and manipulated the election – an event that, according to Trump, was deliberately covered up by the so-called "deep state." While independent experts and intelligence agencies acknowledge that Beijing has a strong interest in American data flows, there is still no evidence of actual manipulation of the vote count. A closer look at the facts, as well as at the history of American interference abroad – from the CIA coup attempt to the NSA's surveillance of Angela Merkel's cell phone – reveals not only a remarkable double standard in security policy. The following analysis reveals how a real threat of data theft is being deliberately exploited to maintain power and why this maneuver threatens to further erode the already crumbling trust in American institutions.

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Secret documents revealed: The crucial gap in Trump's latest conspiracy theory

A president under pressure resorts to the oldest story

On the evening of July 16, 2026, Donald Trump stepped up to the podium in the East Room of the White House to present the nation with a story he had been repeating for years, albeit in a new guise: China had allegedly stolen voter data on a historic scale, thereby influencing the 2020 presidential election. Specifically, he claimed that Beijing had compromised the registration data of 220 million American voters over several years, a fact that its own intelligence agencies had covered up. What is remarkable about this speech is less the content itself than the timing: it comes precisely at a time when Trump's approval ratings have plummeted to historic lows and the Republican Party is struggling to maintain its slim majorities in Congress.

The temporal coincidence is striking enough to be considered a central element of any serious analysis. Anyone wishing to understand the motives behind this speech must first examine the political context from which it arose.

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Numbers that speak against the president

Several independent polling institutes paint a remarkably consistent picture of public sentiment in the summer of 2026. The American Research Group recorded an approval rating of just 30 percent in June, the lowest ever measured by that institute during both of Trump's terms, while 66 percent of respondents disapproved of his performance. The average of the polling aggregators confirmed this negative trend: RealClearPolitics reported 40.3 percent approval, The New York Times 38 percent, and the Silver Bulletin model 38.8 percent, each with a significantly higher disapproval rate. The Washington Post and Ipsos reaffirmed in mid-July that Trump received predominantly negative ratings in almost every policy area, from the economy to foreign policy.

These figures are alarming for the Republican Party because historical patterns show how strongly a president's popularity influences midterm election results. Since World War II, the incumbent president's party has lost an average of 25 House seats in the midterms, with an approval rating below 40 percent traditionally correlating with particularly heavy losses. On the generic congressional ballot, Democrats already held a lead of several points in April, and some 30 Republican representatives had already announced they would not seek reelection at that time—an indication of expectations of significant losses within their own ranks.

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A story that never disappeared

Before the new China thesis can be assessed, it's worth looking at its background. Since his election defeat in 2020, Trump has consistently claimed that victory was stolen from him through fraud, be it allegedly manipulated voting machines, flawed mail-in ballot procedures, or delayed vote counting. For years, neither courts nor recounts nor independent auditors could find any evidence of systematic fraud on a scale that would have altered the election outcome. Even the intelligence chiefs appointed by Trump himself concluded on January 7, 2021, that no foreign state had attempted to manipulate the election result.

In this context, the new China variant appears as a consistent continuation of a tried and tested rhetorical pattern, in which an unchanging core belief is repeatedly embellished with new, supposedly recently revealed details. Political scientist and election law expert Rick Hasen of the University of California, Los Angeles, pinpoints the crucial weakness of the accusation: Trump cannot name a single specific, non-voting individual who actually cast a ballot, nor can he prove that a single voting machine was manipulated. This observation points to a fundamental characteristic of the entire accusation: it remains at the level of alleged vulnerabilities and presumed intentions, without providing the crucial evidence of an actual change in vote counts.

What the released documents actually contain

A closer look at the documents released by Trump reveals a crucial gap. According to several news agencies that reviewed the Chinese intelligence reports before the speech, the reports contained no evidence that votes had actually been manipulated or electronic voting systems compromised. Rather, the documents focused on two distinct issues, which were deliberately conflated in the speech: first, the alleged theft of voter registration data such as names, addresses, and telephone numbers; and second, general assessments, some dating back years, of China's cyber capabilities regarding election infrastructure.

This distinction is not a minor point, but rather the core of the entire controversy. The theft of personal data, if it actually occurred on this scale, would be a serious security issue, but it has nothing to do with election manipulation in the sense of altering the election results. Trump himself indirectly admitted in his speech that he could not establish a direct causal link between the data theft and a change in the 2020 election outcome, but instead spoke of a general threat to the integrity of future elections. During his first term, intelligence agencies had already documented Chinese, Russian, and Iranian attempts at interference, but unanimously concluded that none of these activities had influenced the election result.

The accusation of a cover-up as a rhetorical powerhouse

A central element of the speech was the claim that members of the so-called Deep State had deliberately concealed the alleged activities in China and withheld them from the president and Congress. This cover-up narrative serves an important strategic function, as it explains why there is no publicly known, reliable evidence to date: not because it doesn't exist, but because it has allegedly been systematically suppressed. This line of reasoning is rhetorically clever because it preemptively discredits any demand for evidence and simultaneously establishes an enemy image that encompasses not only China but also the president's own security agencies.

It is telling that Trump himself appointed the heads of the very institutions he now accuses of a cover-up during his first term. This contradiction underscores that the cover-up narrative follows less a rigorous institutional logic than a political need to shift all responsibility outside of himself. Democratic Senator and critic Chuck Schumer articulated this suspicion clearly, attributing Trump's motivation to a fear of a resurgence of the 2020s debate and the need to distract from more pressing domestic issues such as the cost of living.

The fear of losing the power to interpret one's own legitimacy

California Governor Gavin Newsom responded to the speech with an unusually sharp warning, suggesting that Trump would do whatever it takes to remain in power, thus fundamentally questioning the democratic substance of the announcement. This reaction points to a deeper, structural concern that extends beyond the specific accusation against China: the fear that a persistent narrative of allegedly unsafe elections could serve as a pretext for sweeping interference in voting rights, regardless of the actual outcome of the November election.

This concern is further amplified by the parliamentary context. The Save America Act, long championed by Trump and narrowly passed the House of Representatives in February 2026, would introduce nationwide citizenship verification and stricter requirements for mail-in voting. Critics point out that such legislation, supported by a dramatic narrative of foreign data manipulation, is likely to generate public support for restrictions that, in practice, could disproportionately affect low-income, elderly, or mobility-impaired voters, while the alleged causal link between data theft and voter fraud is not scientifically proven.

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The hidden symmetry: America's own history of influence

Spying among friends: Merkel, the NSA and the logic of mutual surveillance

One of the most revealing facets of this debate lies in what was naturally left unmentioned in Trump's speech: the United States' own decades-long practice of interfering in the political and electoral affairs of other countries. Political scientist Dov Levin, in a widely cited study, determined that the two superpowers of the Cold War, the United States and the Soviet Union, intervened in a total of 117 elections worldwide between 1946 and 2000—statistically speaking, roughly one in nine competitive elections anywhere in the world.

Documented cases include the CIA's covert financing and propaganda campaign in favor of the Italian Christian Democrats against a left-wing coalition in the late 1940s elections, which involved the use of forged documents to discredit communist politicians and the organization of mass letter-writing campaigns by American-Italian citizens. Similar covert operations supported the Liberal Democratic Party in Japan for decades, helped Christian factions in Lebanon win elections in 1957 with cash payments, and funded the 1953 campaign of Philippine President Ramon Magsaysay. In Chile, according to a 1970s Senate investigation report, Washington invested nearly four million dollars in approximately fifteen covert operations to prevent the election of Salvador Allende and ultimately supported the military coup against him after his victory in 1970. The CIA-orchestrated overthrow of the democratically elected Iranian Prime Minister Mohammed Mossadegh in 1953 and the involvement in the ouster of Guatemalan President Jacobo Árbenz in 1954 also belong to this historical pattern of covert interventions in the name of geopolitical interests.

This historical symmetry in no way diminishes the possibility of Chinese activities targeting American voter data, should such activities have actually occurred. However, it demonstrates that the blanket moral outrage with which foreign interference in American domestic politics is treated is, historically speaking, selective. As early as 1997, a historian and security archives expert at an American university, referring to similar accusations against China, offered the pointed assessment that the United States was merely getting a taste of its own long-standing practice of manipulation, bribery, and covert operations in numerous countries.

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Merkel's mobile phone as a symbol of a global surveillance apparatus

A particularly instructive example of the double standards of Western security apparatuses is the German wiretapping scandal of 2013. It was revealed that the American National Security Agency had been monitoring the mobile phone of then-Chancellor Angela Merkel for years, even though her number had been registered on a secret list of national intelligence targets since 2002, long before she became Chancellor. Merkel publicly described "spying among friends" as unacceptable, while President Barack Obama assured her in a personal phone call that he had no knowledge of the surveillance – a statement that, given conflicting reports about a possible personal briefing of Obama by the then-NSA director, remains not entirely clear to this day.

What is also remarkable about this case is that the surveillance was not a one-way street. Journalistic investigations revealed years later that the German Federal Intelligence Service (BND) had also systematically intercepted radio communications from Air Force One during Obama's presidency, albeit apparently without official authorization and without the knowledge of the Federal Chancellery. This reciprocal practice illustrates a fundamental characteristic of modern intelligence work among friendly nations: even close allies monitor each other within certain limits, while publicly emphasizing trust and partnership. Obama himself openly admitted in a later interview that American intelligence agencies would continue to collect data because these capabilities served both the national security of the United States and, as he put it, the security of its allies.

A look back at our own practice of influencing elections in the digital age

The NSA affair surrounding Merkel's mobile phone was part of a far more comprehensive global surveillance program, exposed by Edward Snowden's revelations starting in 2013, which affected not only numerous European heads of government but also institutions in Brazil, Mexico, and many other countries. While this primarily involved classic espionage for intelligence gathering and not directly manipulation of foreign election results, the ability to collect personal communications data on a massive scale is structurally precisely the type of activity that Trump is now accusing China of – albeit with American voter data as the target instead of the communications data of foreign officials.

The parallel lies less in the exact nature of the action than in the fundamental logic: Large powers with extensive technological capabilities systematically collect information about citizens, officials, and institutions of other states when they perceive a strategic benefit, justifying this internally with security interests, while reacting with public outrage when similar accusations are leveled against them. This dual structure of official outrage and quiet, self-perpetuating practice has shaped international security policy for decades and can be seen both in American election interventions during the Cold War and in the NSA affair.

The geopolitical dimension: China as the preferred enemy image

The choice of China as the target of these new accusations is by no means accidental. Unlike Russia, whose alleged election interference in 2016 was already extensively investigated and partially confirmed, China, as a rising global power with a systemic rivalry with the United States, offers an enemy image that fits into the Trump administration's overall strategy, both in terms of security and economic policy. The accusation seamlessly integrates into an existing line of confrontation, ranging from trade tariffs and technology export restrictions to tensions in the South China Sea, thus reinforcing an already established narrative of a comprehensive Chinese threat to American society.

This strategic bundling of diverse conflict areas under a unified China narrative significantly increases the political clout of the accusation because it taps into existing resentments and fears within segments of the American public. At the same time, it distracts from domestic problems that are considerably more uncomfortable for the administration, including the persistently negative assessment of economic policy, with a majority of respondents in recent polls critically evaluating the impact of tariff policies.

Between real security threat and political instrumentalization

A balanced assessment must clearly distinguish between two levels that are frequently conflated in public debate. On the one hand, it is quite plausible, and partly documented in earlier intelligence reports from 2022, that Chinese actors have shown interest in American voter registration data, as such datasets can be valuable for influence operations, disinformation campaigns, or general intelligence purposes. Such behavior would by no means be surprising, but would fit into a pattern in which virtually all major intelligence agencies in the world attempt to obtain sensitive data from other states.

On the other hand, there is the political instrumentalization of this inherently serious security issue into a narrative intended to retrospectively delegitimize the party's own election defeat in 2020, without any evidence of a causal link between the alleged data theft and an actual change in election results. This conflation of a plausible threat and an unsubstantiated claim of election manipulation is rhetorically effective because it exploits the credibility of genuine security concerns to bolster a politically motivated, empirically unfounded thesis. Several major American television networks deliberately chose not to broadcast the speech live, fearing the unfiltered dissemination of potentially misleading claims—an unusual step that underscores the media landscape's sensitivity to this type of address.

The midterms in the shadow of the legitimacy debate

With the midterm elections in November 2026 in mind, the China narrative is likely to serve two parallel functions. First, it serves to mobilize the party's voter base by reviving a threat scenario that strongly appeals to its core supporters emotionally and distracts from negative economic and approval ratings. Second, it provides an explanation in advance of potential Republican defeats, which, in the event of an unfavorable outcome for the party, could again point to alleged irregularities—regardless of whether such irregularities can actually be proven.

Historical experience with similar cases and the lack of concrete evidence to date suggest that the accusation is primarily a political tool for preparing for the election year, rather than a newly emerging, credible security revelation. For the actual security of democratic institutions, it is crucial to clearly distinguish the legitimate question of protecting voter data from the unsubstantiated claim of a stolen election result, so that legitimate security concerns do not permanently serve as a pretext for eroding trust in democratic processes.