When President Donald Trump delivered his television tirade Thursday night about “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” and a “cover-up” of Chinese election interference, he directed viewers to examine declassified intelligence the White House had just posted on its website.

To which we can only respond, “Thank you, Mr. President.”

When President Donald Trump delivered his television tirade Thursday night about “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” and a “cover-up” of Chinese election interference, he directed viewers to examine declassified intelligence the White House had just posted on its website.

To which we can only respond, “Thank you, Mr. President.”

Rather than supporting Trump’s inflammatory claims about Chinese election meddling and other threats, the documents undermine many of his arguments. And contrary to his portrait of a diabolical “deep state,” they show an intelligence community that’s almost comically cautious and bureaucratic in reaching its conclusions.

What’s frightening about Trump’s wild accusations of fraud is that they could “undermine confidence in US democratic processes,” which the National Intelligence Council warned in a January 2020 memorandum was a basic goal of foreign meddlers. “Adversaries could make wholly fabricated claims, such as announcing that they have compromised all US voting machines, a claim that would be difficult … for the US Government to disprove,” the memo explained.

Trump tried to sow precisely these doubts in his speech, with claims that hacked voting machines, fake ballots, and illegal voters have sabotaged the integrity of our elections. Though he claimed otherwise, his speech seemed a deliberate attempt to undermine public confidence. Intentionally or not, he was doing our adversaries’ work for them.

There’s an “Alice in Wonderland” aspect to this discussion. Foreign election interference is indeed a serious problem, and Russia has been the leading culprit. But Trump spent much of his first term claiming that the investigation of Russian meddling was a “hoax,” and in the first months of his second term, he dismantled........

© Foreign Policy