President Donald Trump has repeatedly asserted that China meddled in past U.S. elections and intends to interfere in the 2026 midterms. Yet his own administration — through the documents and statements it has released — is quietly and unintentionally undermining those claims.

Reporting on Thursday, Politico's Dana Nickel and Maggie Miller noted that "Trump has long cast doubt on the security of U.S. elections, including by attacking mail-in voting and promoting baseless conspiracy theories of widespread fraud in previous elections." In July, he delivered a prim address on election security that included claims China was behind massive interference efforts targeting past elections. But as Politico observed, "None of the documents the White House released in July appear to support this claim."

The disconnect deepened on Thursday, when the Trump administration's Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency (CISA) published a 13-page plan on protecting election security. Nothing in the document indicates that Chinese meddling is a major threat. That omission carries practical weight: the plan's audience is the state and local officials who actually administer U.S. elections.

"The 13-page plan, dubbed 'Securing the Next 250,' comes just weeks before the midterms, which will determine which party controls Congress for the latter half of Trump's term and provide insight into possible security challenges for the 2028 presidential election," Politico reported.

According to the outlet, "The plan outlines free resources for 'election infrastructure stakeholders,' which the agency defines as state and local election offices, owners of voter registration machines, facilities that store ballots and other election equipment and polling places."

Those resources, Politico continued, "include on-site penetration testing, which simulates a cyberattack on election websites or other critical systems to identify weaknesses; vulnerability scanning for potential software bugs in election-related networks or devices; and access to CISA's tabletop exercises to help organizations practice responding to a cyberattack. CISA has long provided these services, but the Department of Homeland Security largely put them on hold early last year as it evaluated CISA's election security work."

With the plan listing those services as available, the support the department largely put on hold early last year is once again on offer to election offices — weeks out from the midterms. Whether election offices take up that support at scale — and whether any future administration document substantiates the China claims its releases so far have not — will be worth watching as the midterm vote approaches.

Notably, although Trump moved to disempower CISA, the plan itself frames the election integrity measures as accomplishments of the president and his Homeland Security Secretary, Markwayne Mullin.

"Under President Trump's and Secretary Mullin's leadership and direction, CISA's goal is to ensure the American people can trust voting systems and know that physical safety measures will be in place when they go to their assigned polling locations to cast their votes," the document states. "CISA is well-prepared to support the states for any election, whether local, regional, or federal. Election security is not a partisan issue. Election security is national security."

The CISA plan stands in contrast to the primetime speech Trump delivered in July, in which he implicated China in his loss in the 2020 presidential election. At the time, a national security official who once worked for Trump pushed back on that notion.

"I think this was a dangerous speech about an incredibly important topic, with some really questionable remedies in mind," Susan M. Gordon, Trump's former principal deputy Director of National Intelligence, said. "So let me go through that. Number one: since 2016, the intelligence community has been saying that foreign actors intended to influence our election for the purpose of undermining democracy — not undermining a president, undermining democracy. If you recall, the whole 2016-to-2021 first Trump term turned on us trying to say that, and him interpreting it as us spreading misinformation when we tried to share that information. So this is not new — that foreign actors try to influence our election. They do. And with the advent of the digital era, there are lots of tools available to them. So this is not a new threat. It is one he certainly knew of. He had an entire term to deal with it."