By admin 
On Thursday night, Donald Trump raved for 25 minutes on live television about vague allegations of illegally registered voters, the susceptibility of voting machines to hacking, and foreign countries’ efforts to influence how Americans cast ballots. But the most notable aspect of the president’s hoarse and breathy address was what he didn’t say. Despite much ado about declassified documents and vulnerable voter rolls, at no point in the speech did Trump, who has been sore about losing to Joe Biden for going on six years, directly claim that the 2020 election was stolen.
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Instead, the closest Trump came was hand-waving aspersions. “This intelligence underscores why we must take urgent action to ensure that our own system can never, ever be hacked or compromised like it was in the past,” he said at one point, without specifying 2020. He added, “We’re taking swift action to ensure that sensitive voter data is better protected so we can never be bought, we can never be hacked, and we can never watch a stolen election again,” once more declining to name which election he meant. Rather than some grand reveal, the speech ended with Trump lamely encouraging Americans to pressure members of Congress to pass the SAVE America Act. That bill, which would create numerous new hurdles to voting, appears dead in the Senate.
On one hand, Trump’s implication was hard to miss. On the other, omitting any clear-cut assertion that the 2020 race was rigged is deeply out of character. The president has repeatedly and openly cried foul about a contest he lost by 7 million votes, lies he started telling even before it was called for Biden. “Frankly, we did win this election,” Trump told supporters around 2:30 a.m. on election night that year, alleging that “major fraud” was underway. He has maintained the deception ever since. Per Reuters, Trump has stated that the 2020 election was “rigged” more than 100 times in the past six months alone, including to world leaders, at a White House picnic, and during events celebrating Christmas and Hanukkah.
So why not in primetime? One answer is that vague suggestions of electoral impropriety serve Trump’s purposes better than explicitly false claims. Bald-faced lies can be fact-checked, laughed out of court, disagreed with in polls, or at least disputed head-on. Innuendo leaves a lingering stink that’s harder to dispel.
Hence the documents Trump referenced in his speech, which purportedly expose China’s efforts to undermine his 2020 campaign, Venezuelan attempts to rig voting machines, and hundreds of thousands of noncitizens registered to vote in U.S. states. Some of his allegations were already known; others he gave no evidence for or exaggerated beyond recognition. Trump’s noncitizen-voter figure is much higher than other analyses have found, and it’s unclear where his administration got it. Also notably missing was any evidence that noncitizen voters are swaying elections: Even the Heritage Foundation, the conservative think tank behind Project 2025, has documented just 99 cases of ballots cast by noncitizens since 2000. A CIA assessment Trump declassified and the White House posted online does conclude that Venezuela had “some capability” to manipulate voting machines in 2020—but that it lacked “the capability to manipulate the outcome of an election outside Venezuela.” China, according to another intelligence assessment, took “some low-level, exploratory steps to denigrate” Trump aimed at influencing public opinion, not changing election results. The 2020 election was arguably the most checked, rechecked, and litigated in history; none of those recounts or court challenges altered the result.
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Overall, though, Trump’s speech wasn’t as egregious as some had feared. Ever since the White House announced it, speculation had run rampant. Would the president falsely claim that Georgia’s two Democratic senators, who won shortly after he lost the state to Biden, were illegitimately elected? Some Republicans, meanwhile, salivated. “This may be the most important Oval Office address since the Cuban Missile Crisis,” Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio posted. Ultimately, the hype fell flat—and not just because Trump didn’t speak from the Oval. Georgia didn’t even get a mention.
So why get everybody worked up if you don’t have the goods and the bill you’re pushing has almost zero chance of becoming law? Some of the things Trump did say offer a clue. The president started his speech with a litany of boasts. He bragged about the stock market, the border, and his efforts to lower drug prices. Other than his claim that Democrats cheat in elections “because your policies are so bad,” none of that minuteslong preamble had much to do with voting. But it does suggest a strategy behind what was otherwise an equivocal, meandering, probably pointless address: to distract from the very real ways in which Trump’s presidency is failing. Prices, which he promised would come down rapidly, keep rising. The Iran war, which he says we’re “winning big,” looks like a strategic defeat. His only real legislative achievement, a tax cut, hasn’t improved Americans’ views of the economy—or even of how much they’re being taxed. (In a recent Washington Post poll, more said the law had raised their taxes than said it had lowered them.) Some surveys show Trump’s approval ratings mired in the mid-30s—worse than at this point in his first term and lower than Biden’s ever got.
Still, even vague presidential speeches can be dangerous. Long before last night, Trump managed to convince a significant share of Americans that the 2020 election was indeed stolen. Some of them believed him fervently enough to commit violence at the Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021. More impressively, he succeeded in getting enough voters to look past his election denialism to win back the White House. Thursday’s address could lay the predicate for exerting federal power over this fall’s midterm elections, including possibly via a declaration of national emergency.
One irony of all this misdirection, though, is that Trump is right about some of our electoral infrastructure’s vulnerabilities to foreign influence campaigns, which can shape how voters see candidates, and cyberattacks, which can delay results. This isn’t a unique insight; lawmakers of both parties have flagged those weaknesses for years. And while there are things the federal government can do to combat them, Trump has done the opposite. The Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which helps harden state election systems against data breaches and other threats, has been gutted. Trump also shuttered an FBI task force on foreign influence and fired a federal commission that helps states administer elections. For anyone paying attention, it’s hard to take seriously Trump’s claim that he cares about secure elections; his real thesis is that any election he loses is suspect. Just don’t check the fine print.
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