U.S. President Donald Trump looks on during a bilateral meeting with the Prime Minister of Iraq Ali al-Zaidi, in the Oval Office of the White House on July 14, 2026 in Washington, DC. In his first foreign trip since taking office, Zaidi is visiting the White House to hold talks on U.S. investment into the Iraqi economy amid instability in the region. (Photo: Andrew Harnik / Getty Images) By Nandita Bose and Joseph Ax
The 25-minute address underscored Trump’s effort to make election security a central political issue ahead of November’s midterm elections, when Republicans will be defending their congressional majorities and face the possibility of losing control of one or both chambers.
Trump has pressed his fellow Republicans in Congress to pass legislation imposing new voter identification and citizenship requirements, despite longstanding findings that voter fraud in U.S. elections is rare.
The president said he was declassifying sensitive information that showed China had illicitly acquired 220 million U.S. voter files, including names, addresses and other data used to register to vote.
He asserted that members of the U.S. intelligence community deliberately suppressed information about the extent of China’s activities.
His allegations contradict an unclassified 2021 U.S. intelligence community assessment that found no indications any foreign actor attempted to alter or succeeded in altering “any technical aspect” of the 2020 presidential election vote, including voter registrations, ballots, tabulations or results.
The assessment was conducted under John Ratcliffe, then Trump’s director of national intelligence and now his CIA director.
Ahead of Trump’s speech, some White House officials expressed concern that disclosing the China information could be misleading, sources told Reuters.
Trump’s harsh language about China risked rocking a relationship that has steadied following last year’s costly trade war. Trump hopes to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in September about improving trade relations.
Before Trump began speaking, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy, Liu Chang, said in response to a request for comment, “China has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the U.S.”
Trump has spent years raising doubts about electoral outcomes, falsely asserting that his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden was rigged. He has also advanced other false claims, including that mail-in balloting is rife with fraud, voting machines are vulnerable and non-citizen voting is widespread.
Numerous courts and vote recounts found no evidence of large-scale fraud in the 2020 election.
Trump also said he was declassifying data that would reveal “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.”
But many of the documents appeared to show the opposite, or were not related to U.S. election infrastructure at all. One CIA document, prepared last month, concerned Venezuela’s election, not America’s.
“We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results,” another document said.
A third document - produced by the CIA - detailed efforts by Chinese spies to target Biden’s campaign and noted that Beijing “does not currently intend to covertly interfere to try to sway the outcome of the election,” although it said China might later decide to do so.
“Trump’s shocking ‘bombshells’ about China are totally bogus,” Democratic Senator Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. “The fact is our intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that China did not even try to change a single vote in the 2020 election.”
FAMILIAR CLAIMS
Earlier on Thursday, Democratic members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence sent a letter to the acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, along with the leaders of the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, warning them not to allow Trump to “weaponize intelligence to support false claims about election security.”
Two of the three major U.S. television networks and CNN decided not to broadcast the prime-time address on their primary platforms, departing from a practice typically reserved for major addresses on issues of national import.
Since returning to office in January 2025, Trump has sought to expand federal power over the administration of elections, which legally resides with state governments under the U.S. Constitution.
In recent months, he has also pressured Senate Republicans to advance a bill, the SAVE America Act, that would require photo ID to vote and proof of U.S. citizenship to register while also mandating that states share voter registration information with the federal government. Democrats and voting-rights advocates say that voter fraud is exceedingly rare and argue the legislation would suppress legitimate votes.
Some Republican leaders have urged Trump to focus on issues that matter most to Americans, including high living costs, rather than focus on the 2020 vote.
“I don’t know what he’s going to say,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune said when asked on Wednesday whether he would advise Trump to avoid talking about the 2020 election. “The only thing I can tell you is, we are focused on the 2026 election, at least I am, and I think most of my colleagues are.”
Republicans are navigating political headwinds as the midterm elections approach, with Trump’s approval rating underwater and voters deeply frustrated by the Iran war and attendant high energy prices.
Democrats need to flip only three Republican seats to take a majority in the U.S. House of Representatives. They face an uphill battle to win a Senate majority, however, with critical races unfolding in Republican-leaning states.
Democrats are preparing for the White House to attempt to manipulate November’s election, Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer told reporters on Wednesday.
“They know they can’t win the election fair and square,” he said. “So we don’t put it past them to try whatever they can.”
(Reporting by Nandita Bose and David Morgan in Washington; Additional reporting by Erin Banco, Edmund Lee, Ismail Shakil, Jasper Ward and Doina Chiacu; Writing by Joseph Ax; Editing by Colleen Jenkins, Don Durfee and Howard Goller)