Communist China has spent decades robbing American workers blind.

Now President Trump’s team thinks Beijing has its eye on a bigger prize than factories and trade secrets.

And Peter Navarro told Bill O’Reilly exactly what has the White House worried ahead of the midterms.

What Navarro Told O’Reilly About 2026 and 2028

Trump trade advisor Peter Navarro sat down for an interview with ex-Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, and he didn’t dance around the subject.

“They have the capabilities [to interfere] and we’re worried about this coming election in ’26 and again in ’28,” Navarro said.

Navarro told O’Reilly that President Donald Trump knows this threat well. The administration’s position is that the Chinese Communist Party already meddled in the 2020 presidential election, according to Mediaite.

Some backstory helps here. In the summer of 2026, the Trump administration released a trove of documents and accused Communist China of producing “tens of thousands” of fake driver’s licenses in 2020 so Chinese nationals could vote for then-candidate Joe Biden.

The White House also accused Beijing of stealing voter registration data on 220 million Americans.

According to the FBI document the administration released, the regime collected names and addresses from millions of TikTok users, along with details on which devices they used, and planned to build the bogus licenses around the identities of real Americans.

Navarro didn’t treat any of this as a surprise. “They attack us everyday,” Navarro said.

He ran through the list for O’Reilly. Beijing hacks the American financial system, steals intellectual property, and subsidizes its own industries until American competitors go out of business.

The Paper Trail Beijing Would Rather Nobody Read

Beijing denies all of it. And critics of the administration point to a 2021 National Intelligence Council assessment that concluded China considered influence efforts in 2020 but did not deploy them, as CBS News reported.

But that same assessment carried a dissent. The National Intelligence Officer for Cyber judged with moderate confidence that China did try to undermine Trump’s reelection, mainly through social media and public statements, while agreeing that he saw no tampering with election processes themselves.

The FBI report on the licenses deserves the same careful reading. Fox News noted that the document came from a confidential source and carried a warning that nobody should treat it as finally evaluated intelligence.

But here’s a detail that doesn’t depend on any informant. Customs and Border Protection officers at Chicago’s O’Hare airport seized 19,888 counterfeit US driver’s licenses in the first six months of 2020, according to the agency’s own count, and most of them came from China and Hong Kong.

Then there are the 2022 midterms. A declassified assessment from the Office of the Director of National Intelligence found that the Chinese government tacitly approved efforts to influence a handful of midterm races involving both parties. Joe Biden’s own intelligence agencies wrote that.

So when Navarro says the White House is worried about a midterm, he’s pointing at something American intelligence already documented once.

The Center for Strategic and International Studies went through the documents the administration released and found the intelligence community warning again and again about Chinese collection of American election data. One August 2020 assessment said Beijing preferred to see Trump defeated.

Why Mail-In Ballots Sit at the Center of the China Worry

Look at what the alleged license scheme was for. The FBI document says Beijing wanted those fake IDs to account for tens of thousands of mail-in votes.

That lines up with a warning the country got a long time ago. The 2005 Commission on Federal Election Reform, co-chaired by former President Jimmy Carter and former Secretary of State James Baker, put it in plain English: “Absentee ballots remain the largest source of potential voter fraud.”

A ballot that leaves the polling place travels through the mail, lands on a kitchen table, and comes back with a signature some overworked clerk may or may not check. And a hostile government sitting on 220 million voter files would know exactly which names and addresses to use.

That’s the whole case for the SAVE Act and for President Trump’s push to tighten mail-in voting. Proof of citizenship and in-person voting with ID close the door a foreign adversary would walk through.

None of this proves Beijing will lift a finger in the 2026 midterms. Navarro himself talked about capabilities, and he didn’t describe a confirmed operation. But a government that waits for proof of a break-in before buying a lock isn’t taking security seriously.

The timing is awkward for the usual critics. Navarro’s warning came shortly after Chinese President Xi Jinping wrapped up a three-day visit to the United States, a trip Trump called “very productive” for both countries.

Trump can negotiate with Xi on trade and still guard the ballot box. Navarro has described the two issues as separate lanes, and that’s the America First approach in a nutshell. He’ll make the deal and keep an eye on the other side while he does it.

And it’s hard to miss how the same press corps that spent years chasing Russia stories treats warnings about Communist China as a punchline. Foreign interference was the gravest threat to the republic right up until the suspect changed.

Meanwhile the forecasters are already calling the race. CNN’s Harry Enten warned that a “blue wave” is headed for the GOP, and Nate Silver said “every indicator” looks bad for Republicans except their cash advantage.

But tight elections come down to a few thousand ballots in a few places. That’s the scale the alleged 2020 scheme targeted, and it’s why Navarro went on O’Reilly’s show to sound the alarm.

And he mentioned 2028 too, so the White House plainly doesn’t expect this worry to go away after one election.

Sources: Mediaite, “Peter Navarro Tells Bill O’Reilly Trump Admin Is ‘Worried’ About China Interfering in Midterms”; Fox News, “Alleged Chinese scheme to influence 2020 election for Biden being probed by FBI, Senate Judiciary Committee”; CBS News, “China showed ‘greater willingness’ to influence US midterm elections in 2022, intel assessment says”; CBS News, “Trump to allege Chinese meddling in US elections in primetime speech, sources say”; Center for Strategic and International Studies, “What Do the Election Security Documents Say About Chinese Interference in US Elections?”; The White House, “Election Integrity”