If there’s anything Donald Trump enjoys more than “relitigating the 2020 election,” said Peter Baker in The New York Times, it’s “finding ways to cast doubt on the 2026 election.” The president did both this month, giving a primetime address to the nation in which he called the U.S. electoral system “so broken and vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” Debuting a new conspiracy theory of how his 2020 loss was “rigged,” Trump accused China of having “bought, stolen, or hacked” millions of voter registration files in the run-up to that election. As for the validity of this November’s midterms—a likely “drubbing” for Republicans—Trump offered a grab bag of predicates for disputing the results, including the claim that at least 278,000 noncitizens are registered to vote in federal elections. In a curious move, said The Wall Street Journal in an editorial, the White House released a trove of intelligence documents that actually undermine Trump’s claims. The reports showed that the data China acquired was publicly available, and that Beijing largely stayed on the sidelines in 2020. As for the foreigners registered to vote, that claim relies on a dataset that’s plagued with errors. So why give this speech at all? It’s too late to enact Trump’s SAVE America Act package of voting restrictions in time for the midterms, and his supporters may now be wondering whether they should bother going to the polls in November, if our elections are as “catastrophically” broken as Trump claims.
In fairness, said Tom Nichols in The Atlantic, Trump’s documents do prove that one hostile foreign power “engaged in operations against” the 2020 election. That nation is Russia, which the declassified reports state used a “range of measures” to boost Trump’s chances in 2020, from spreading rumors about Joe Biden’s supposed “criminal activity” in Ukraine to flooding social media with Trump-loving bots. Of course, our Putin-fan president didn’t mention the Russian autocrat in his speech. But he did emulate him, said Nick Catoggio in The Dispatch, issuing “fascist threats” to revoke the broadcast licenses of “fake news” networks ABC and NBC for the crime of declining to carry his lie-filled speech live.
We know why Trump gave this speech, said Brian Tyler Cohen in The Bulwark. In February, The Washington Post reported that Trump allies had drafted a 17-page executive order that would let him use the “pretext” of foreign interference to declare a “national emergency.” Trump could then dispatch troops or ICE agents to polling places, and even seize voting machines. If Democrats rush to block the order in court, Trump could point to his recent speech—its “nonsensical” content notwithstanding—as proof that he was warning of foreign meddling as far back as July.
Trump’s attempted theft of the midterms is already underway, said Zolan Kanno-Youngs in The New York Times, and he’s using “the full arsenal of the federal government.” Led by “election deniers and loyalists,” the FBI and CIA are hunting for pretexts to discredit state election officials, while Justice Department lawyers craft legal arguments to prosecute them. Even the Postal Service is floating a Trump-approved plan to roll back mail-in voting. These are perilous times, said David A. Graham in The Atlantic, but “a close election is easier to steal than a decisive one.” Trump’s speech removed any doubt that he intends to sow “chaos” in November. Instead of discouraging Americans, that should inspire us to turn out in overwhelming numbers, and vote like our democracy depends on it.