{"id":49251,"date":"2026-07-18T12:28:13","date_gmt":"2026-07-18T19:28:13","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/?p=49251"},"modified":"2026-07-18T12:28:14","modified_gmt":"2026-07-18T19:28:14","slug":"here-are-the-10-ways-trump-shot-himself-in-the-foot-last-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/2026\/07\/18\/here-are-the-10-ways-trump-shot-himself-in-the-foot-last-night\/","title":{"rendered":"Here are the 10 ways Trump shot himself in the foot last night."},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Donald Trump’s speech to the nation was not only bashed as a “sore loser” rehash, it proved the opposite of what he hoped to prove.<\/h3>\n\n\n\n
Miles Taylor<\/a> Jul 17\u2219Preview<\/td><\/tr><\/tbody><\/table><\/figure>\n\n\n\n
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Donald Trump commandeered primetime last night to make the case that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Instead, he declassified the receipts proving it wasn\u2019t.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

I have to say that yesterday evening\u2019s speech was one of the more remarkable instances of presidential \u201cblowback\u201d we have ever seen. Again and again, the president made sweeping claims and pointed Americans to data, documents, and a public record that proved the literal opposite <\/em>of what he was saying. Trump shot himself in the foot repeatedly without realizing it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In a roughly 30-minute address<\/a> from the East Room (which major networks<\/a> didn\u2019t carry live), the president unveiled a trove of newly declassified intelligence documents<\/a> that he claimed would expose a vast foreign plot against him and a \u201cDeep State\u201d conspiracy to bury it. What the documents actually show when you read them, in the government\u2019s own words, is that the plot was minor, that the bigger foreign operation was run for<\/em> him rather than against him, and that the national security professionals he spent the evening demonizing are the reason the 2020 election stayed secure.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Rarely has a president worked so hard to disprove his own case without even understanding how. Indeed, he handed his critics the evidence file. I\u2019m going to walk you through what I wrote down last night as the TEN biggest claims that he tried to make\u2026 and how he proved the opposite.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

ONE, Trump tried to prove that China \u201cfought like hell\u201d to steal the 2020 election.<\/strong> I really want you to key in on those words. He told the nation that Beijing \u201cfought like hell\u201d to meddle in the vote, citing what he described as long-suppressed intelligence about their plot to undermine the presidential election and Trump himself. He even read aloud from what he described as CIA documents showing Beijing would \u201cleverage all domestic and foreign elements that were opposed to the US president\u201d to reduce his vote count.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, he released documents admitting China\u2019s efforts were \u201clow-level.\u201d<\/strong> The assessment from the National Intelligence Officer for Cyber and the Director for Election Threat Analysis (now posted on the White House\u2019s own website) says Beijing took \u201clow-level, exploratory steps\u201d to shape voter perceptions, and notes that even this was a minority view<\/em>: it \u201cdiffers from the IC\u2019s judgment that Beijing has considered but not deployed influence efforts to affect the Presidential election.\u201d The analysts assigned themselves \u201clow-to-medium confidence.\u201d The documents further assess that China deliberately avoided its \u201cmost aggressive options\u201d because Beijing \u201cwants to minimize the risk of blowback.\u201d Whoever wrote his \u201cfought like hell\u201d remarks in the speech was hoping no one would go read the actual documents.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TWO, Trump implied that China stole data that could\u2019ve affected the outcome.<\/strong> The centerpiece was his allegation of a Chinese hack of more than 200 million U.S. voter records<\/a>, which the president portrayed as a smash-and-grab on American democracy itself, full of insinuation that this data represented the keys to the kingdom electorally.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His own documents show much of that data came from public websites\u2026 and that the Chinese apparently didn\u2019t do anything with it.<\/strong> To be clear, this data was not the ballots themselves but the lists of people who are registered to vote, their addresses, etc. One of the declassified records states that voter registration information was downloaded from \u201cU.S. commercial websites,\u201d e.g. data brokers, the same type of \u201cpeople search\u201d websites you can go sign up for right now. This is the internet\u2019s digital white pages. As election officials were quick to point out last night, voter rolls are largely public records<\/em> in most states. If a foreign actor unlawfully scrapes that data, it\u2019s unlawful, but it doesn\u2019t touch a single ballot, a single tabulator, or a single result. The same document adds that the data from Colorado, Connecticut, Florida, Michigan, Oklahoma, and Rhode Island \u201cwas downloaded by a Chinese actor on 14 January 2022.\u201d Check that date again. January 2022<\/em>. Fourteen months after Joe Biden won. And what did the Chinese do with this data to \u201cupend\u201d our elections? One of the declassified documents<\/a> said Chinese officials conducted \u201cpublic opinion analysis.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

THREE, Trump said the \u201cDeep State\u201d hid the Chinese plot from him.<\/strong> He cast himself as the last to know, as if personnel in the national security community deliberately tried to keep the information from him. He claimed outright<\/a> that the \u201cDeep State\u201d intelligence community never informed the White House or Congress about this bombshell information.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The record shows he was briefed on Chinese meddling as far back as 2018 and even spoke about it publicly.<\/strong> The documents the White House released are<\/em> the briefings. They were produced by his own administration\u2019s analysts, during his own presidency, and delivered to his own White House. Even if the president didn\u2019t actually read them, his team did. And I can personally attest that he was verbally briefed on the threats. Because I was one of the briefers. In fact, Trump was so taken with what we told him about foreign meddling that he made a speech about it<\/a> to the United Nations. Unfortunately, he refused to talk about the countries we told him were interfering in elections to help his candidacy (Russia) and only wanted to warn about the countries that might not want to see him re-elected (China). What\u2019s more, one of the main classified assessments underpinning Trump\u2019s arguments last night \u2014 that he was kept in the dark by the spy community \u2014 was delivered to the president and congressional leadership on January 7, 2021<\/a>, while Trump still occupied the Oval Office.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FOUR, Trump attempted to stitch the disparate facts together to prove his candidacy was hurt by the interference.<\/strong> The framing of the evening was Trump-as-victim, showing that he was a president besieged by hostile powers and betrayed by his own government.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

He revealed documents showing foreign actors actually worked to <\/strong>boost<\/strong><\/em> his candidacy, undermine his rival, and may have had help from inside Trump\u2019s own movement.<\/strong> The most damning material in the release concerns Russia, not China. A National Intelligence Council product describes Putin and senior Russian officials personally \u201coverseeing efforts by proxies\u201d (including sanctioned agents) to \u201corchestrate a high-profile corruption scandal implicating former Vice President Biden and the Democratic Party at the peak of the 2020 US presidential campaign.\u201d Their stated aim: \u201cto defeat the former Vice President and ensure the President\u2019s victory.\u201d The documents note these narratives were advanced through \u201cU.S. officials and other prominent persons,\u201d through \u201cdocumentary film releases via US and Ukrainian media outlets,\u201d and that \u201cU.S. persons are key to propagating these narratives.\u201d Another assessment states flatly that \u201cKremlin-linked actors are also seeking to boost President Trump\u2019s candidacy on social media.\u201d In other words, Trump declassified proof that the Kremlin ran a pro-Trump influence operation using American amplifiers that was far more significant <\/em>in scope than any Chinese efforts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

FIVE, Trump went further and claimed that the \u201cDeep State\u201d not only hid all of this from him, but they hid it from the American people.<\/strong> It was a cover-up, he said, of catastrophic proportions. The documents, he insisted<\/a>, had been hidden from him and<\/em> from the American people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The intelligence community published a public assessment five years ago, and last night\u2019s \u201cbombshells\u201d were already included in it.<\/strong> On March 16, 2021, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence publicly released its declassified assessment<\/a>, Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections<\/em>. It disclosed Russia\u2019s pro-Trump influence operation, Iran\u2019s anti-Trump efforts, and the debate over China\u2019s intentions, including the minority view Trump now brandishes as suppressed truth. Multiple documents in last night\u2019s release explicitly reference it. Nothing Trump \u201crevealed\u201d differs in substance from what the American people were told in 2021. Trump\u2019s team learned the hard way last night that you cannot expose a \u201ccover-up\u201d by basically linking to a press release that\u2019s been sitting on the internet for half a decade.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SIX, Trump tried to make Americans believe voting in this country is not safe.<\/strong> Election security, he warned, \u201cfalls catastrophically short.\u201d He claimed the newly released documents reveal \u201cshocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure<\/a>\u201d and warned that American voting systems are at risk of being \u201crigged and stolen.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

His own documents say the opposite in bold print.<\/strong> One declassified assessment states that vote tabulation systems \u201cwould be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results,\u201d noting the systems \u201care not connected to the Internet.\u201d The March 2021 assessment\u2019s very first key judgment found \u201cno indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process\u201d \u2014 registration, ballot casting, tabulation, or reporting. So Trump held a primetime address to terrify voters about their election systems and then quietly linked to documents that certified those systems as sound.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

SEVEN, Trump directed officials to investigate people inside the U.S. government who supposedly enabled these plots by hiding them from view. <\/strong>He threatened that heads would roll and that his administration would pursue prosecutions.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The material he released shows that the U.S. government \u201cDeep State\u201d successfully protected the elections \u2014 including Trump\u2019s own campaign effort.<\/strong> If anyone owes anyone a thank-you note, Trump should be writing to the career intelligence officers who spent 2020 tracking and countering plots aimed at his campaign, Biden\u2019s campaign, and the election writ large. Instead, the president publicly trashed them. But page by page, the documents he declassified show quite clearly how the U.S. government became aware of foreign interference and proactively kept it at bay. Indeed, the people Trump was excoriating were the very same people who discovered the plots against him and Biden, tracked them in real time, warned policymakers (including Trump), and briefed the public. China, Russia, and Iran all wanted to meddle, yet there is still no evidence a single vote was changed<\/a>. That\u2019s the opposite of a scandal; it\u2019s a success story.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

EIGTH, Trump warned about systemic \u201ccorruption\u201d inside the U.S. government.<\/strong> He seemed to suggest that it was more than just a handful of individuals who were responsible for the claims he made last night.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The president inadvertently highlighted how all the election protection structures \u2014 that worked to protect democracy in 2020 \u2014 are being dismantled by him in 2026.<\/strong> Every page declassified last night exists because America built a serious election-defense architecture after 2016, including FBI election task forces, DHS infrastructure monitoring, ODNI fusion cells, and more. One of the major ironies of Trump\u2019s speech is that he brought a spotlight back to the fact that he\u2019s dismantled each of them. His<\/em> team shut down the FBI election task force. His<\/em> team has been breaking up the main DHS election defense agency. His<\/em> team is in the process of gutting ODNI. And just last week, he purged<\/a> the bipartisan Election Assistance Commission \u2014 the federal agency that helps states secure their voting systems. Put another way, the systemic \u201ccorruption\u201d is being carried out by Trump himself, who is trying to cover the U.S. government\u2019s eyes and ears to future election interference.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

NINE, Trump tried to use the speech to justify the SAVE America Act.<\/strong> The speech was a primetime lobbying pitch<\/a> for the stalled voter-ID bill he has made his singular legislative obsession, refusing to sign other legislation until it reaches his desk. He declared that the only reason anyone could oppose the bill is an intention to \u201ccheat.<\/a>\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But nothing in his own evidence has anything to do with voter ID.<\/strong> Not one document described a threat that a photo ID at a polling place would have stopped. The foreign influence operations, data scraping, and social media manipulation he described have nothing to do with voter ID. If Congress took the president\u2019s evidence seriously, it would restore funding to the election-protection systems his administration is tearing down. That mismatch gave away the whole game last night. The SAVE America Act was never about the threat; rather, the threat was conjured to sell the bill, albeit very unconvincingly.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

TEN, Trump hoped the night would suggest he was the rightful winner in 2020.<\/strong> That was the emotional core of the speech, and it\u2019s the wound he cannot stop reopening, to the dismay of Republicans on Capitol Hill.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Instead, he reminded the world that he\u2019s a sore loser, and he re-upped evidence about who actually tried to corrupt the 2020 election.<\/strong> By dragging the country back to 2020, Trump resurfaced the criminal allegations he\u2019d rather bury. The recorded phone call pressuring Georgia\u2019s secretary of state to \u201cfind\u201d 11,780 votes; his own Attorney General, Bill Barr, telling investigators the stolen-election claims were baseless; the dozens of courts that threw out his challenges; the fake electors scheme; January 6th. The most extensive, best-documented attempt to interfere with the 2020 election wasn\u2019t run from Beijing or Moscow. It was run from the White House by the man who stood in the East Room last night, six years later, still litigating his loss on national television. Social media was flooded <\/em>with those examples before, during, and after Trump\u2019s speech. It was as bad of a \u201cself own\u201d as you could manufacture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Trump wanted last night to be the opening argument for overturning the past and pre-litigating the future, a predicate for crying foul in November. What he delivered was a confession dressed up poorly as an expos\u00e9. He showed us that the foreign plots against him were minor and defeated, and he reminded us that the big one was run on his behalf\u2026 that the \u201cDeep State\u201d saved the election\u2026 and that the loudest election saboteur of 2020 was the man at the podium.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Donald Trump aimed for vindication last night. But he shot himself in both feet.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Your friend, in defiance,<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Miles Taylor<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Donald Trump’s speech to the nation was not only bashed as a “sore loser” rehash, it proved the opposite of what he hoped to prove. Miles Taylor Jul 17\u2219Preview Donald Trump commandeered primetime last night to make the case that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Instead, he declassified… Continue reading → <\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1879],"tags":[335],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49251"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=49251"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49251\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":49254,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/49251\/revisions\/49254"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=49251"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=49251"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/occupysf.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=49251"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}