U.S. President Donald Trump arrives at Reading Regional Airport in Reading, Pennsylvania, U.S., June 23, 2026.
On Friday, a whistleblower from President Donald Trump’s first administration alleged that China is integral to his plan for “meddling in the midterms.” According to security analyst Miles Taylor – who served as Deputy Chief of Staff in the Department of Homeland Security and leaked a number of White House secrets during Trump’s previous term – the president is counting on the threat of Chinese electoral interference to provide a pretext for his election denial schemes.
Taylor’s claims come as Trump is in the middle of a summit with Chinese leader Xi Jinping in D.C., during which the president’s decorum has been questioned as “weirdly” deferential to the U.S. adversary. “It’s worth noting,” reminds Taylor, “that this is the same Donald Trump who told us over the summer — breathlessly in a primetime press conference — that China had compromised our electoral system and that the communist nation was assaulting American democracy. It was a serious accusation. But then he did nothing about it. No sanctions. No expulsions. No consequences of any kind. Not a peep since. Odd, right?”
But according to Taylor, this makes perfect sense from the perspective of Trump, who is desperate to sow doubt about election integrity. “After years in the intelligence community, I know that the worries about the Chinese Communist Party trying to manipulate American democracy are very true and very alarming,” writes Taylor. “So should Trump. But he doesn’t care much about that. What he cares about is that the threat is convenient for storytelling. To him, the China scare is the perfect pretext for his own meddling in the midterms, a threat to be invoked when useful and forgotten when not. How else do you explain that his answer to the supposed attack on our elections from China is to roll out the red carpet at Joint Base Andrews and grovel?” As many have noted, it is unusual for a U.S. president to greet visiting heads of state anywhere but the White House, but Trump met Xi at the airport personally, where he had U.S. service members on their hands and knees smoothing the red carpet.
Later at the White House, as American billionaires gathered for a lavish party Taylor notes was on par with Gatsby, in his estimation, “The widest smiles and biggest laughs may have come from the visitors. Honestly, maybe they were the only ones in the room who saw the whole picture. For two years this administration has made China the convenient villain for things Trump cares about — they’re the threat to our elections, the ones stirring up panic over data centers, the ones creating a trade imbalance that Trump must fix. Yet Xi’s delegation has long known what others are just starting to figure out. Trump doesn’t believe any of it. He uses Beijing as a foil for his own projects…. to take control of the elections… to profit from the data center boom… to run the American economy by brute force.” As Taylor concludes, ”The man who rails against communism on Fox News — and runs ads against it! — spent the evening rhetorically bear-hugging the communists scattered around his dining room. Everyone at every table was in on the joke.”