{"id":434,"date":"2026-07-17T16:44:45","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T16:44:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=434"},"modified":"2026-07-17T16:44:45","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T16:44:45","slug":"the-most-important-thing-about-trumps-big-election-speech-was-what-he-didnt-say","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=434","title":{"rendered":"The Most Important Thing About Trump\u2019s Big Election Speech Was What He Didn\u2019t Say"},"content":{"rendered":"
\n

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\u2019 efforts to influence how Americans cast ballots. But the most notable aspect of the president\u2019s hoarse and breathy address was what he didn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

Read more America Has Explosive Diarrhea. Is Donald Trump to Blame?<\/a><\/p>\n

Instead, the closest Trump came was hand-waving aspersions. \u201cThis 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,\u201d he said at one point, without specifying 2020. He added, \u201cWe\u2019re 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,\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

\n<\/div>\n

On one hand, Trump\u2019s 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\u00a0million votes, lies he started telling even before it was called for Biden. \u201cFrankly, we did win this election,\u201d Trump told supporters around 2:30\u00a0a.m. on election night that year, alleging that \u201cmajor fraud\u201d was underway. He has maintained the deception ever since. Per Reuters, Trump has stated that the 2020 election was \u201crigged\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

So why not in primetime? One answer is that vague suggestions of electoral impropriety serve Trump\u2019s 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\u2019s harder to dispel.<\/p>\n

Hence the documents Trump referenced in his speech, which purportedly expose China\u2019s 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\u2019s noncitizen-voter figure is much higher than other analyses have found, and it\u2019s 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 \u201csome capability\u201d to manipulate voting machines in 2020\u2014but that it lacked \u201cthe capability to manipulate the outcome of an election outside Venezuela.\u201d China, according to another intelligence assessment, took \u201csome low-level, exploratory steps to denigrate\u201d 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.<\/p>\n

Read more Democrats Have a Process for Replacing Graham Platner. It\u2019s Controversial.<\/a><\/p>\n

Overall, though, Trump\u2019s speech wasn\u2019t as egregious as some had feared. Ever since the White House announced it, speculation had run rampant. Would the president falsely claim that Georgia\u2019s two Democratic senators, who won shortly after he lost the state to Biden, were illegitimately elected? Some Republicans, meanwhile, salivated. \u201cThis may be the most important Oval Office address since the Cuban Missile Crisis,\u201d Sen. Bernie Moreno of Ohio posted. Ultimately, the hype fell flat\u2014and not just because Trump didn\u2019t speak from the Oval. Georgia didn\u2019t even get a mention.<\/p>\n

So why get everybody worked up if you don\u2019t have the goods and the bill you\u2019re pushing has almost zero chance of becoming law? Some of the things Trump did <\/em>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 \u201cbecause your policies are so bad,\u201d 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\u2019s presidency is failing. Prices, which he promised would come down rapidly, keep rising. The Iran war, which he says we\u2019re \u201cwinning big,\u201d looks like a strategic defeat. His only real legislative achievement, a tax cut, hasn\u2019t improved Americans\u2019 views of the economy\u2014or even of how much they\u2019re being taxed. (In a recent Washington Post poll, more said the law had raised<\/em> their taxes than said it had lowered them.) Some surveys show Trump\u2019s approval ratings mired in the mid-30s\u2014worse than at this point in his first term and lower than Biden\u2019s ever got.<\/p>\n

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.\u00a06, 2021. More impressively, he succeeded in getting enough voters to look past his election denialism to win back the White House. Thursday\u2019s address could lay the predicate for exerting federal power over this fall\u2019s midterm elections, including possibly via a declaration of national emergency.<\/p>\n

One irony of all this misdirection, though, is that Trump is right about some of our electoral infrastructure\u2019s vulnerabilities to foreign influence campaigns, which can shape how voters see candidates, and cyberattacks, which can delay results. This isn\u2019t 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\u2019s hard to take seriously Trump\u2019s claim that he cares about secure elections; his real thesis is that any election he loses is suspect. Just don\u2019t check the fine print.<\/span><\/p>\n

Read more Hegseth Wants to Test Troops\u2019 Testosterone Levels. It\u2019s Absurd\u2014and Dangerous.<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

He has told the same lie more than 100 times. Why did he back off it Thursday night?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":433,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[10,13,89],"class_list":["post-434","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-politics","tag-donald-trump","tag-elections","tag-joe-biden"],"yoast_head":"\nThe Most Important Thing About Trump\u2019s Big Election Speech Was What He Didn\u2019t Say - Home Move Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/homemovechronicle.com\/?p=434\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"The Most Important Thing About Trump\u2019s Big Election Speech Was What He Didn\u2019t Say - Home Move Chronicle\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"He has told the same lie more than 100 times. 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