Donald Trump’s White House address to the nation about election integrity landed with all the force of a cotton ball. No one who has followed the last three presidential elections would have predicted an honest accounting from the 47th president, who continues to falsely insist that he won the 2020 contest against Joe Biden. The octogenarian’s claims of stolen elections have long since been debunked, rejected at the time by everyone from Mike Pence to Trump-appointed jurists to the rest of the world. But like boomers seeing their favorite band, long shed of most of its original members due to age or addiction, Americans had every reason to expect a respectable version of Free Bird. Instead, we got an incoherent narrative, which doesn’t mean we should be relieved, only reminded that Trump will be more, not less, irascible as the midterms approach.
As a sheer act of speechcraft, it was a mess. Television famously compresses images, so the gold (naturally) curtains that were feet behind Trump looked like they were inches behind him. Trump, surprisingly wan, surrounded by two flags—one American, one with seal of the president—offered an inchoate collection of charges such as China obtaining voter information to non-Americans registered to vote to Venezuela (before we made it the 51st state) hacking into voting machines to encore classics like the “Deep State” (Light a match!) that never added up to a coherent narrative, just a grab bag of supposed vulnerabilities. And since the address began with Trump’s now familiar braggadocious second-term riff—we were dead, it was transgender for everybody and open borders, now we’re the hottest country—some of the urgency was missing. Is the nation imperiled, or is it “respected like we have never been respected before”?
It was telling that CBS News aired an excellent special report on the election integrity address, which examined the president’s claims and found them wanting. For all the understandable concerns about Larry and David Ellison and their takeover of Paramount, and Bari Weiss and the rest of it, Tony Dokoupil, Major Garrett (a friend and former colleague), Margaret Brennan, and David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation Research and the rest of the CBS News team asked all the right questions about Trump’s dubious claims.
For instance, on the noncitizens on the voter rolls, Becker noted that the administration
looked at 68 million records from states using high-quality data and has found only 28,000. That’s 0.04 percent that may be non-citizens. We have followed my organization, my nonprofit, the Center for Election Innovation Research, has followed these claims, and even that is an overstatement because DHS publicly states that their data is incomplete. They don’t have complete citizenship data in the United States, and so they have some false flags. The 250,000 number that’s based on using commercial data that cannot be used. It’s going to create a ton of false positives. I guarantee you that the data includes a ton of people, maybe even a majority, who are absolutely eligible voters.
Likewise, Garrett underscored that much of what Trump claimed were merely theoretical vulnerabilities about election integrity, not actual malfeasance, which is a big deal given all the redundancies and security features, most notably a paper trail, that is a hallmark of American voting. And Senator Mark Warner, the Virginia Democrat who has long been the ranking member of the Select Committee on Intelligence, noted, “Where would you like me to start on the level of falsehood? You know, just incredible lies. Let’s start with the initial comments about China and 2018-20. All of this took place under Donald Trump’s administration. His current CIA director was the director of national intelligence.”
Even Fox News, perhaps chastened by their millions in legal settlements in the Dominion suit, didn’t exactly embrace Trump’s claims before Hannity segued to Gutfeld! When you’ve lost Murdoch…
Of course, looking for truth in a Trump address on election integrity is like trying to find a $100 bill on the street. It’s possible you could stumble across a Benjamin, but it’s unlikely.
Trump’s talk had the air of desperation, which doesn’t make it less dangerous, but it does reveal the president’s weakness. He’s unpopular; inflation is down a tad but gasoline prices are more than 40 percent higher than a year ago, and the midterm elections look forbidding for Republicans, even though the capacity of Democrats to blow it à la Graham Platner should never be underestimated.
With his war of choice in Iran a quagmire, Trump is left trying to change the subject and lay the predicate for interfering with the midterms. But as my colleague, Washington Monthly Legal Affairs Editor Garrett Epps, noted in a recent lengthy piece, stealing the midterms is no easy feat. There are 435 separate House elections and 35 separate Senate elections across 50 states. It requires competence to pull off a heist like this, and the likes of Pete Hegseth and Kash Patel are no Ocean’s Eleven crew. Plus, it requires GOP allies to backstop the president, and they may not be there this time as the president’s popularity sinks.
Still, Trump’s continued determination to screw with elections should be worrisome even if his power is diminished. Some people will believe the vulnerability canards and stay home, which is bad whether they vote the way you happen to like. He could bring the government to a halt over his stalled, perhaps unconstitutional SAVE Act, the bill that adds all sorts of impediments to voting, which is currently stalled in the Senate under threat of a Democratic filibuster. In other words, a weakened, aging Trump isn’t a tame Trump. He still possesses a kind of feral intelligence that was not on display in his Thursday night address to the nation, but that shouldn’t be underestimated.
