If it’s newsworthy enough to rebut, it’s newsworthy enough to air it first. The voters have heard it all – the words, the rebuttals, and the fact-checking – and they elected him twice. Denying him 22 minutes in year ten is not prevention. It’s condescension.
Michael Smerconish (CNN)
The whole architecture of American government rests on a single phrase: “the consent of the governed.” Thomas Jefferson put it in the Declaration of Independence in 1776, borrowing and sharpening an idea from John Locke, who argued decades earlier that legitimate political authority can only come from the agreement of the people being governed, not from divine right or brute force. It is, in a real sense, the founding premise of the country. Governments don’t rule by default. They rule because the people let them, and that consent is expressed, concretely, at the ballot box.
Which is exactly why President Trump’s prime-time address on election integrity this week deserves more attention than it got. If the mechanism through which Americans grant or withhold consent — the vote — is not trustworthy, the whole premise collapses. It’s not an abstraction. We saw what happens when a meaningful share of the country concludes an election was illegitimate: January 6 happened. Whatever anyone believes about that day’s causes, nobody should want a repeat of it, and the surest way to invite one is to let the legitimacy of elections stay a matter of permanent, unresolved suspicion. The president summed it up in a line worth remembering: “No Trust, No Greatness.” A country that doesn’t trust its own elections can’t function as one.
That’s the frame for what was actually in the speech and the accompanying document release from the White House. Setting aside the noise around it — Democrat David Axelrod sneered (in scare quotes) on social media that Trump would trot out “political apparatchiks posing as intel experts” to manufacture “evidence” — the speech was newsworthy. Declassified reporting says roughly 220 million American voter records have been bought, stolen, or hacked by the People’s Republic of China. Maybe ballots were not switched, but a foreign adversary is sitting on a database covering most of the U.S. electorate (names, addresses, phone numbers, party affiliation). Now why would they do that, Mr Axelrod?
Put into perspective, this election-security breach (220M) is bigger than the Equifax breach (147M) in 2017, and the 2020 National Intelligence Council Assessment cited multiple areas in which China can now meddle; such as (1) change your address, (2) register you to vote in another location, or (3) vote in your name (source: CBS News). Imagine the chaos in Georgia’s gubernatorial and senatorial elections if China changed the address of every voter in Atlanta. Ka-boom! GOP sweep and Democrats have their own January 6 riots.
Separately, released internal communications show an intelligence official writing that a Presidential Daily Brief was “deliberately massaged” to avoid direct links to Chinese election activity, and an FBI official describing herself as “running a shadow government.” A Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency report in the same release documents weak access controls and outdated systems at the state and local level, with red-team testers gaining full network control within hours.
While none of this proves a 2020 vote tally was altered, it does prove the system has real, demonstrated exposure, and that some of the people responsible for leveling with the public instead worked to obscure what they knew. Sadly, this includes many of our nation’s major networks, who declined to carry the President’s address live, or delayed coverage until they’d decided something in it was sufficiently “newsworthy.” That’s a call the White House press corps and network executives made on behalf of tens of millions of viewers who never got the chance to hear the speech themselves and judge it.
Whatever anyone thinks of Trump, he is THE sitting president. He alone sits atop the nation’s intelligence and law enforcement pyramid. When newsrooms decide which parts of his address the public is allowed to hear live, they’re not protecting anyone from misinformation. They’re substituting their own judgment for the public’s, on the one topic — the credibility of elections — where public judgment is supposed to be sovereign.
Two inconvenient truths for the networks; such as no reporter – not one – having access to the un-redacted documents in order to distinguish between real evidence and “manufactured” evidence, especially before the “no broadcast” decision. Further, most of these networks buried the “Biden Laptop” story based on a single letter signed by 51 “former senior intelligence officials” (emphasis mine), when the FBI had already concluded the laptop was authentic. Which is why only 23% of conservatives trust the major networks’ news divisions (source: Washington University).
Then there’s China, a country that has spent years working to lock up global rare-earth mineral supply chains that American defense and technology manufacturing depend on, that runs persistent, well-documented cyber intrusions against U.S. infrastructure and institutions, and that, per this release, has apparently been sitting on a huge slice of the American voter file. Given all of that, treating a request for basic voter-list hygiene and stronger system security as some kind of extremist demand gets the risk calculus backwards. Caution here costs almost nothing and buys a great deal.
Only a fool would sit back and wait for China to act. Just this week, satellite imagery shows the PRC has built a full-scale mock-up of a US Navy Burke-class destroyer at its Ruoqiang Test Range in the Taklamakan Desert. The 155-meter model includes a full mast, simulated radar equipment, and sensors meant to mimic an active warship’s radar signature, making it a test-target for China’s DF-21D and DF-26 “carrier killer” missile systems (source: Bloomberg and Newsweek). If that doesn’t scare you, then nothing else will.
In Trump’s first term, because China was “ripping us off” with intellectual property theft and mercantilist trade practices, he levied aggressive, targeted tariffs on Chinese imports, which New York Times columnist Paul Krugman called “an exercise in profound ignorance” that would “trigger a global trade war…permanently crush American agriculture…send inflation skyrocketing.” There was NO global economic collapse, Biden left the tariffs mostly intact, and 70% of voters liked the confrontational economic posture toward China (source: Pew Research). To say Krugman was wrong is an understatement.
Which brings us to the SAVE America Act: photo ID to vote, documentary proof of citizenship to register, and mail-in ballots limited to voters with a genuine reason — illness, disability, travel, deployed military. Pew Research found 83% of Americans, including 71% of Democrats, support voter ID specifically. These aren’t fringe positions; they’re closer to consensus than almost anything else in American politics right now. If Democrats in Congress have concerns about specific provisions, the answer is to put forward an alternative that addresses those concerns while still delivering the safeguards – not sit on the bill and let it die in committee.
It would be reasonable, Mr. Axelrod, to suspect manufactured paranoia about 2020 AND still support shoring up protections for this fall’s elections. It’s simple prudence, not partisanship, because the only way to sustain a government legitimized by the consent of the governed is to make sure the elections generating that consent are ones that are trusted.