Are 101 too few? Must we expect even more dirty tricks to try to prevent Donald Trump from winning the 2024 US presidential election; or, if he wins, to prevent him from assuming office?
Bradley Thayer is pretty sure that Chinese Dictator Xi Jinping “Cannot Permit a Trump Victory,” in which case we had better “Expect PRC Election Interference on a Massive Scale.”
It is hard to contradict this judgment given the Chinese Communist Party’s behavior to date, including its continuous beaming of anti-Western, anti-American, pro-totalitarian propaganda in all possible forms and venues.
At warroom.org, Thayer says that a second Trump administration would be a nightmare for Xi, since Trump “well understands the evil nature of the CCP and why it is an existential threat to the U.S.” He adds that a second Trump administration would wage all-out “economic and political warfare against the CCP.”
Whatever his inconsistencies, from 2017 to 2020 President Trump did do much to challenge the Chinese state. But we can’t fairly read the policies of that first Trump administration as constituting all-out “warfare against the CCP.” And Thayer does not really explain why he believes that a second Trump administration would double or quadruple the previous efforts to counter CCP machinations. He simply proposes that if a second Trump administration did go all-out, it might well be very effective.
A Trump victory is an existential threat to the CCP in a period of great peril for it due to its economic crisis and years of tyrannical rule. Its reign of terror might be ended if the Chinese diaspora, the U.S., and people of goodwill around the world choose to put their shoulders to the task. Working with such a coalition, Trump could do this. So the 2024 U.S. election is critical for Xi and the CCP.
Taking the CCP’s recent interference in Taiwan’s elections as a sign of things to come, Thayer urges us to be on the lookout for “political warfare strategies employed on TikTok, other apps, and social and legacy media to hurt the Trump campaign and favor Biden, Newsom, or Obama.”
We should expect AI and deepfake video, cyberwarfare, efforts to flood states with fake ballots and to abet ballot harvesting, and other confusing-sowing stratagems.
Also:
The cadre of likely People’s Liberation Army and Ministry of State Security, and other PRC agents that have infiltrated the U.S. southern border, are certain to play a nefarious role. These men will be able to add real muscle to election interference, to say nothing, of course, of the countless other ways that this fifth column of PRC agents threatens U.S. national security, from political assassinations to sabotage.
China probably won’t send warships and warplanes to threaten our West Coast and our East Coast. But almost everything else in the Chinese Communist Party’s election interference playbook, yeah, it won’t come as a shock.
