Six years after losing the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Donald Trump gave a primetime televised address blaming China for rigging it against him. Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman, a Democrat who has spent the last year making Republicans feel weirdly comfortable, looked at all of that and said: buddy, you have a war going on. Maybe focus.
Trump Is Still Doing This. Yes, Still.
Let's set the scene. It is the year 2026. The United States is actively at war with Iran. Trump's approval ratings are, according to every available poll, not great. And the President of the United States used a primetime, televised, nationally broadcast address on Thursday to tell America that China stole the 2020 election from him.
This is not a bit. This is not satire. According to The Guardian, Trump dedicated the address to claims about Chinese interference in a race he lost to Joe Biden six years ago. Six years. The man has the nuclear codes and he is spending his evenings relitigating a race he himself accidentally admitted he lost, on a podcast, before claiming the admission was sarcastic.
The intelligence community, for its part, put this one to bed back in 2021. A formal assessment found that China did not attempt to alter any technical aspect of the 2020 voting process, did not conduct interference efforts aimed at changing the outcome, and frankly did not consider either Trump or Biden worth the diplomatic risk of picking a favorite. America's own spies said China was not the culprit. Trump is still saying China was the culprit. This is where we are.
Fetterman Steps Up to Say the Obvious Thing
On Sunday, appearing on CNN's State of the Union with Jake Tapper, John Fetterman said what a lot of people were thinking, which is that maybe the president could do literally anything else. "I don't know why the president is dragging up all this stuff," Fetterman said. "You're the president. Do something positive -- and you are talking about 2020; that's been settled over six years ago."
He also made the point that is almost too obvious to need making, but apparently does need making: "It's deeply unhelpful and that distracts from important things, especially like the Iranian war right now." The Iranian war. The actual, ongoing, people-are-dying conflict that the United States is currently involved in. That thing.
Fetterman also confirmed, in case anyone in Pennsylvania was still confused about this, that the state's 2020 results were "absolutely secure, fair and accurate." He noted that he was the state's lieutenant governor at the time. "Pennsylvania picked Joe Biden in 2020," he said. "That's a fact." Not a theory, not a contested claim. A fact.
The Part Where Fetterman Gets Complicated
Here is where the Fetterman story gets thornier, because Fetterman is not exactly running a conventional Democratic operation these days. The Guardian reports that on Wednesday, just days before his CNN appearance, Fetterman said he would consider leaving the Democratic party if it ever became "the anti-Israel party." This came after more than 100 House Democrats voted to halt military aid to Israel over its military operations in Gaza and Lebanon.
Fetterman has been one of the most vocal pro-Israel voices in the Democratic caucus since joining the Senate in 2023. He acknowledged that Republicans have made efforts to recruit him to their side, which tracks -- he is increasingly useful to them as a prop. But he told CNN he has no interest in switching, because he disagrees with most Republican policy positions. So he is staying put, for now, while carving out a lane that makes progressive Democrats furious and Republican strategists quietly hopeful.
This is a man who contains multitudes, or at least contradictions. He will correctly call out Trump for spiraling into 2020 conspiracy content while an actual war unfolds. He will also stake out a position on Israel that puts him closer to the right flank of American politics than the left. He is not simple, and anyone writing a simple story about him is probably getting it wrong.
The China Accusation Has No Legs and Never Did
It is worth being precise about what Trump actually claimed, because the specifics matter. The 2021 intelligence community assessment, cited by The Guardian, found that while Russia ran influence operations specifically aimed at damaging Biden's campaign, China took a pass. American intelligence concluded that China did not see a meaningful difference between a Trump or Biden presidency in terms of its own strategic interests, and therefore decided the interference risk was not worth it.
Trump conceded, again, that he lost the 2020 race -- this time on a podcast, where he said it was "by a whisker" -- before subsequently claiming he was being sarcastic. At this point the rhetorical pretzel-bending required to keep this story alive is extraordinary. He lost. He said he lost. He said he was joking about saying he lost. Now China did it. His own intelligence apparatus says China did not do it. The president of the United States is in open disagreement with his own intelligence community about a fact they have formally assessed and documented.
The Dingo Take
The funniest and most depressing thing about this story is the timeline. Trump is not doing this because he has run out of other things to do. He is doing this while the country is at war. He is doing this while his approval numbers slide. He is doing this because, after everything -- two presidencies, an impeachment, 91 felony counts, a conviction, a comeback -- the thing that apparently still lives rent-free in his head is one Tuesday in November 2020 when America looked at him and said no thanks. That loss broke something in him that six years and a second term have not fixed.
Fetterman, whatever you think of his politics, at least said the thing out loud on national television. The president needs to stop. There is a war. There are midterms. There is a country that requires actual governance. Relitigating a certified, adjudicated, intelligence-community-confirmed election result in a primetime address is not governance. It is a man screaming into a mirror he has been screaming at for six years.
And the midterms are coming. Opponents of Trump are already warning, as The Guardian notes, that this whole 2020 revival tour is laying groundwork to cast doubt on upcoming results. If that is the play, it is the same play, run again, by the same guy who ran it the first time. At some point you would think the script would get old. Apparently not yet.
