Trump officials just discredited his China election meddling claims

President Donald Trump has repeatedly said that China has meddled in past American elections and is planning on interfering in the 2026 midterms — and yet he himself is unintentionally and quietly undermining these claims.

"Trump has long cast doubt on the security of U.S. elections, including by attacking mail-in voting and promoting baseless conspiracy theories of widespread fraud in previous elections," reported Politico's Dana Nickel and Maggie Miller on Thursday. "In July, he delivered a primetime address on election security, which included claims that China was behind massive interference efforts targeting past elections. None of the documents the White House released in July appear to support this claim."

Then, on Thursday, Trump's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) released a 13-page plan on protecting election security, and nothing in it indicated that Chinese meddling is a major threat.

"The 13-page plan, dubbed 'Securing the Next 250,' comes just weeks before the midterms, which will determine which party controls Congress for the latter half of Trump’s term and provide insight into possible security challenges for the 2028 presidential election," Politico added. "The plan outlines free resources for 'election infrastructure stakeholders,' which the agency defines as state and local election offices, owners of voter registration machines, facilities that store ballots and other election equipment and polling places."

Politico continued, "These resources include on-site penetration testing, which simulates a cyberattack on election websites or other critical systems to identify weaknesses; vulnerability scanning for potential software bugs in election-related networks or devices; and access to CISA’s tabletop exercises to help organizations practice responding to a cyberattack. CISA has long provided these services, but the Department of Homeland Security largely put them on hold early last year as it evaluated CISA’s election security work."

Although Trump tried to disempower CISA, the document itself clearly presents the election integrity measures as being Trump's and those of his Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin.

"Under President Trump's and Secretary Mullin's leadership and direction, CISA's goal is to ensure the American people can trust voting systems and know that physical safety measures will be in place when they go to their assigned polling locations to cast their votes," the report wrote. "CISA is well-prepared to support the states for any election, whether local, regional, or federal. Election security is not a partisan issue. Election security is national security."

Back in July, when Trump delivered his speech implicating China in his loss in the 2020 presidential election, a security official who once worked for Trump debunked that notion.

"I think this was a dangerous speech about an incredibly important topic, with some really questionable remedies in mind," Trump's former principal deputy Director of National Intelligence Susan M. Gordon explained. "So let me go through that.Number one: since 2016, the intelligence community has been saying that foreign actors intended to influence our election for the purpose of undermining democracy — not undermining a president, undermining democracy. If you recall, the whole 2016-to-2021 first Trump term turned on us trying to say that, and him interpreting it as us spreading misinformation when we tried to share that information. So this is not new — that foreign actors try to influence our election. They do. And with the advent of the digital era, there are lots of tools available to them. So this is not a new threat. It is one he certainly knew of. He had an entire term to deal with it."