Trump Set Fire to America’s Election Defenses. Now He’s Pointing at the Smoke.

Trump warned the country in a primetime address on Thursday that foreign governments could exploit America’s elections. He did not mention that his administration has spent the past year-and-a-half disbanding the FBI team responsible for investigating foreign election operations, gutting the intelligence center created to track foreign political influence, withdrawing support from the principal election-threat-sharing network, proposing to eliminate CISA’s election-security program, failing to reconvene a crucial NSA Cyber Command election task force, and incapacitating the federal commission responsible for certifying voting systems.

Trump framed his July 16 address as an exposé of the officials who supposedly left American elections exposed and concealed the danger from the public. But the institutions he accused of negligence are the same institutions his administration has since weakened, defunded or dismantled.

As a result, his speech carried a devastating and entirely unacknowledged implication: if the United States is now less capable of detecting foreign interference, securing voting infrastructure or responding to cyberattacks, Trump’s own policies are largely to blame.