There is a version of this country in which Donald Trump tells Americans the truth he has been handed: that their elections are secure. Once, he apparently wanted to.

The Atlantic reported after Thursday night’s address that a February 2020 election-security briefing pleased Trump so much he wanted to announce the news himself. The press conference never happened. The election did, and Trump lost it.

More than six years later, he mocked the assurances he once wanted his name on, describing a system “so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it”. The evidence hadn’t changed. Its usefulness had.

Trump is dangerous twice over: in what he does and what he tells us to fear while doing it. Factcheckers agreed he proved nothing. Failing as evidence, his address succeeded as permission – for federal intervention already under way in Fulton county.

In his speech, Trump assembled old intelligence, vulnerabilities and lies into a conspiracy: 220 million US voter records in Chinese hands, “extremely exposed” voting machines, 278,000 supposed noncitizens on the rolls and a deep-state burial of proof. Yet some documents he released contradicted him.

A 2021 intelligence-community assessment distinguished foreign influence from interference with registration, ballot casting, tabulation or results, and found no indication that any foreign actor attempted the latter. A newly released document judged tabulation systems difficult to manipulate at election-changing scale; a report on Venezuelan voting never confirmed large-scale electronic fraud even there. The files instead documented a Russian influence campaign intended to defeat Joe Biden: allegations related to the Ukrainian gas company Burisma spread........

© The Guardian