With 110 days remaining until voters decide the balance of power in the next Congress, Donald Trump used a rare prime-time address to accuse unnamed national security officials of hiding information about the security of America’s elections and alleged Chinese efforts to interfere in the election he lost nearly six years ago.
Speaking from the East Room of the White House, Trump said he was releasing “critical intelligence” showing “shocking vulnerabilities” in America’s election system in a bid to pressure the current Republican-led Congress to pass partisan voting restriction legislation he has deemed essential to helping his party retain control of the House and Senate.
Citing no evidence, the president claimed American elections are vulnerable “to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference” and accused the People’s Republic of China of carrying out “the largest compromise of election data in history” by acquiring election data — much of which is commercially available for purchase by political campaigns and other interested parties.
“They wanted to just make you sound like your president wasn’t so hot, when actually your president has done a great job, and they did everything possible to do exactly that,” he said.
He further accused “the deep state” of working to “actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling, covering it up from both the president and the American people.”
“Those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden. They did not disclose to me as president or to anyone else, and to the best of our knowledge, they did not inform Congress,” Trump said.
The president, who according to White House sources has never read the daily briefings compiled for him by intelligence officials and prefers oral presentations with illustrations, claimed “rogue bureaucrats” had “deliberately massaged the presidential daily briefing to withhold information regarding Chinese activities related to the election.”
Much of what the president cited has been public knowledge for years. A March 2021 report prepared by the ODNI found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”
The report also stated that the U.S. intelligence community assessed with “high confidence” that the Chinese government “did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome” of the 2020 election.
By contrast, the U.S. IC did assess with similarly “high confidence” that the Russian government did conduct “influence operations aimed at denigrating President Biden’s candidacy and the Democratic Party, supporting former President Trump, undermining public confidence in the electoral process, and exacerbating sociopolitical divisions in the US” while refraining from efforts to access American election infrastructure.
But Trump did not mention the well-documented history of foreign election interference on his behalf — including by Russia in both the 2016 and 2020 elections.
Nor did he mention that the U.S. intelligence community was headed in 2020 by then-Director of National Intelligence John Ratcliffe, who currently serves as director of the Central Intelligence Agency.
Instead, his speech was peppered with unverifiable claims aimed at convincing Americans that the election he conclusively lost nearly a decade ago was illegitimate — despite it having taken place during his first term when his appointees were in full control of the U.S. national security apparatus — in support of his assertion that the American election system is “so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.”
He also accused major television networks of participating in the alleged plot on behalf of “the radical left” by refusing to carry his bizarre speech live and called for two — NBC and ABC — to have broadcast licenses cancelled.
“Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses. They use our public multi-billion-dollar-in-value airwaves for absolutely no money,” he said.
The president’s remarks on Thursday were originally reported to include/included the assertion that the state of Georgia’s two senators, who originally came to office during the 2020 cycle, were in office for illegitimate reasons.
Ahead of the president’s speech, both men, Sens. Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, ridiculed the president’s inability to accept his defeat, six years on.
“His comments are illegitimate, and I’m sorry that his hurt his feelings are deeply hurt that the people of Georgia rebuked him in 2020. You would think he’d be over it. He won in 2024,” Warnock told The Independent on Thursday.
Ossoff added in a gaggle on the Hill: “The world’s most famous sore loser will deliver a primetime presidential sour grapes address to pursue his six-year-old grievances about the 2020 election, while his war in the Middle East spirals out of control and the cost of living continues to rise for Americans across the country.”The SAVE America Act, and a related piece of legislation called the SAVE Act, are ostensibly meant to address Trump’s baseless belief that the American election system is rife with fraud.
He accused anyone of opposing the unpopular partisan legislation of wanting to “cheat.”
“Unless you want to cheat, the only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your system is so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get away or can’t get elected any other way,” he said.
Trump has spent much of the last year obsessing over the partisan voting restriction legislation, which in its current form would require Americans to provide both a photo ID and proof of citizenship, like a birth certificate or passport, in order to vote in federal elections.
It would also require states to conduct wholesale purges of their voter rolls, with the stated aim of ensuring that non-citizens — are already barred from voting in federal elections — from casting ballots.
Democrats and some Republicans believe that the legislation would disenfranchise potentially millions of Americans by excluding those unfamiliar with the requirements ahead of time from participating in voting.
The president also believes that the act would disenfranchise mail-in voters, though he is wrong. Provisions that would have heavily restricted mail-in ballots were excluded from the current version of the legislation.
As it stands, the legislation has the support of most (but not all) of the Senate Republican caucus, making normal passage through the 60-vote filibuster threshold impossible. Democrats control 46 seats in the chamber, and none support the legislation.
Trump and his allies in GOP leadership are, as a result, hoping to pass the legislation through the 51-vote budget reconciliation path through the Senate. This would mark the third budget reconciliation package of the second Trump presidency. Some senators are reportedly unsure that the provisions of the SAVE America Act will survive the judgement of the parliamentarian, who rules whether budget provisions run afoul of Senate procedure.
Some Republicans are unsure that a third reconciliation package is even politically possible, a sentiment shared by Senate Majority Leader John Thune on Thursday.
“Then the question on the floor [is] … can we get 50 [votes] on anything? And even if we can get 50 to pass it, can we defeat all the poison-pill amendments?” Thune pondered to reporters in a gaggle. “It’s a much easier proposition in the House.”
The president’s history of being unable to forgive opposition, win or lose, dates back to his earliest entrance into politics.
In 2016, the president argued that “millions” of undocumented immigrants voted for his opponent, Hillary Clinton, during the election he won to ascend to the presidency for the first time. Trump would go on to repeat that unfounded claim throughout his first presidency into his unsuccessful re-election bid against Joe Biden in 2020. That year culminated with a massive campaign undertaken by Trump’s inner circle to contest the results and push local officials to overrule them, capped off by the January 6 attack on Congress.
And it didn’t end there. Trump would go on, according to The New York Times MAGAworld whisperer Maggie Haberman, to insist to guests and friends at his Mar-a-Lago resort that he would be reinstated as president before the 2024 election, which he eventually won, defeating Kamala Harris.
That reinstatement never took place.
His speech on Thursday follows the launch of efforts by his administration to vindicate his longstanding and unproven claims to have won the 2020 election, including an unprecedented FBI raid on election offices in Fulton County, Georgia in January; the jurisdiction was one of the top targets of Trump’s efforts to change the election results after he became the first Republican in decades not to carry the Peach State’s electoral votes.
At the time, Former Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard raised eyebrows by attending the FBI search despite her office having no domestic law enforcement authority whatsoever.
Gabbard has since been forced out of her role but Trump hasn’t let the target out of his sights.
In March, Trump issued an executive order that was aimed at creating a federal voter roll and asserting control over mail-in ballots, which was halted by a judge.
For months, Democrats have fretted that his fixation on bringing elections under the control of a federal government Trump controls would lead to the National Guard, ICE agents or other federal law enforcement being deployed at polling places on election day.
The White House has called that a “baseless” conspiracy theory, while not directly ruling it out.
