Coons: ‘No concrete evidence’ foreign actors changed election results

Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.), a senior member of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, said President Trump produced “no concrete evidence” during a primetime address to the nation Thursday that the Chinese government or any other foreign actors changed the results of the 2020 presidential election.

“I heard nothing new. I heard no concrete evidence or even allegations that foreign actors actually changed the results of American elections,” Coons told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins in an interview.

“There were lots of dark and sinister allegations that we have vulnerabilities in our election system. But if you listen carefully to what he said, this was all making a case that we should pass the SAVE [America] Act in the Senate. And his own Republican majority in the Senate is refusing to take it up and pass it,” Coons said, referring to Trump’s top legislative priority, which would require people to prove citizenship when registering to vote and to provide photo identification to vote, and would restrict mail-in ballots.

Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-S.D.) has attempted to pass the SAVE America Act or elements of it on at least five occasions but has failed to muster the 60 votes needed to advance the legislation.

Trump has repeatedly called on Senate Republicans to abolish the filibuster to make it easier to pass the act, which is formally named the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, but Thune says there aren’t enough votes to do that.

Trump claimed during his Thursday night speech that the Chinese government has acquired 220 million U.S. voter files and the members of the “deep state” have “worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling.”

Trump also claimed that “tens of millions of voters’ data” across 18 states have been “bought, stolen or hacked by China.”

The White House released more than 270 pages of evidence to back Trump’s claims, but critics such as Coons say that the Trump administration has failed to prove that the 2020 election results were substantially impacted.

“This really amounted to a temper tantrum from our president that his own party, which controls Congress, won‘t pass the voter suppression bill that he has been pushing and pushing for them to take up. I hope they won‘t fall for it,” Coons said.

The Delaware Democrat compared Trump’s claims about foreign election interference to his unsubstantiated claim during his 2025 address to Congress that millions of people older than 100 years are improperly receiving Social Security benefits.

Critics say that claim was based on flawed data.

The Social Security commissioner said that people who are older than 100 and don’t have a date of death linked to their Social Security record were not necessarily receiving benefits.

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