Thursday night, Donald Trump launched into a primetime TV diatribe rehashing his obsession with the idea that the 2020 election was stolen from him and that forthcoming elections must be made more “secure” in ways that ultimately keep eligible people from voting in a way that benefits him. This time around, he pointed to declassified documents he said showed China had meddled in 2020.

The evidence doesn’t show that; the documents vaguely note that entities affiliated with the Chinese government might have obtained some voter information, well short of the fantasy that they manipulated the results to engineer Joe Biden’s victory.

Ironically, the biggest threat to our election integrity contemplated by this speech is the speech itself, and the efforts by the man who gave it to cast doubt on our election systems and results for entirely personally politically motivated reasons.

If the big finding here is that China was probing for ways to obtain information about U.S. voters and influence U.S. public opinion, well, of course they were. Every adversarial foreign government (and probably a few we consider allies) is constantly jockeying to influence the American political system by legitimate and illegitimate ways, just as the U.S. is doing to all of them. This has been true of international relations forever, and each nation takes its steps to fortify against this meddling, which is exactly what the U.S. did.

Despite the litanies of insinuations, neither Trump nor his cronies have ever managed to present any shred of evidence that China — or anyone else — successfully broke into or altered election results in any way.

The closest we’ve ever gotten to concrete evidence that a hostile foreign power intervened in our politics to the point of having potentially impacted results is ironically the pretty well-documented intervention of Russia in the 2016 election, which Trump certainly seems uninterested in discussing beyond his false claims that it is a hoax.

The Kremlin did not have to break into actual voting systems; instead, hackers and trolls, at the direction of Vladimir Putin, broke into DNC and Hillary Clinton campaign systems and selectively disseminated leaks meant to damage Clinton’s campaign while fanning the flames online.

They did this not because they wouldn’t have preferred to hack into voting systems, but because this is all but impossible with our decentralized and mostly offline system of vote collection and counting. There is no single voting system in the United States, as the Constitution delegates this task to states, something Trump also doesn’t seem to like as he tries to take over all voting himself.

We all know that this is a political movement sadly immune to shame and to charges of hypocrisy. Yet it’s still worth pointing out that the Trump administration has itself completely dismantled huge swaths of our election security infrastructure and aggressively reoriented federal resources away from preventing and investigating cyberattacks, including around our electoral systems specifically.

The administration has also been embroiled in an improper effort to wrangle sensitive voter data from multiple states, an effort that has failed over and over in the courts because it lacks any authority or reasonable basis to make the demands. Insofar as there is a malicious group that Congress, the courts, and our local and state leaders must fortify our elections against, it’s MAGA.

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