Our most recent book is The Comeback: The 2024 Elections and American Politics. The second Trump administration has been full of ominous developments.
For years, President Trump has offered a hodgepodge of conspiracy theories and baseless charges to support his falsehood that the 2020 election was stolen from him, and that America’s election system was hijacked by a combination of outside powers and “deep state” insiders.
But when he declassified a raft of intelligence reports, hastily drafted emails between officials at the F.B.I. and other agencies, and formal “assessments” late Thursday, he was unable to prove his case.
An examination of the more than 270 pages of evidence released by the White House supports the broad conclusions already announced in 2020 and 2021, albeit with some finer details. For example, China considered modest attempts to influence opinion in the United States, and downloaded publicly available voter rolls from several states, but never manipulated a single voting machine or ballot.
Even new assertions, such as a document from the Department of Homeland Security claiming to have found more than 250,000 noncitizens registered in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania, came devoid of supporting evidence and immediately was met with pushback from state officials.
The documents are so damning in refuting Trump's own case that I wonder if anyone in the White House actually read them (or understood what they were looking at) https://t.co/8jUP0zVMTp
— Tom Nichols (@RadioFreeTom) July 17, 2026
