WASHINGTON—Even before his 20-minute speech blaming his 2020 election loss on everyone but himself and his own administration, President Donald Trump’s primetime “election fraud” broadcast got some pretty bad reviews.
Some pundits said his speech was primarily a justification for the demand he ended with—his insistence that Congress pass the SAVE Act, one of the biggest voter restriction bills ever put forward in the United States. Most, however, saw in the speech something even more dangerous. They saw a president laying the groundwork for de facto cancellation of free midterm elections.
Trump’s July 16 speech made one obvious point, as did two analyses: Trump will go to any length to win this fall, including putting troops on the streets to intimidate voters and seizing ballot boxes.
That’s dangerous to democracy, Virginia Burger, the senior defense policy analyst at the Project for Government Oversight, told lawmakers months ago. Her remarks were in the context of National Guard troops on the streets of D.C. (where they remain), Los Angeles, Chicago, and the Twin Cities.
“When Americans walk through their cities to see armed service members standing on street corners, executing orders grounded in politicized rhetoric, trust in their military is degraded,” she said.
“When the structural divisions between military operations and civil law enforcement—societal norms foundational to our democracy—are eroded, the potential for violent conflict between Americans and their own military escalates.
“Our apolitical military is a cornerstone of our democracy, and the domestic deployment of our troops raises concerns because it shatters that cornerstone,” Burger said.
Sen. Jon Ossoff, D-Ga., Rep. Jim Himes, D-Conn., and numerous others said it was clear that Trump was making the case for ignoring the results of the election if they’re not in the Republican Party’s favor. The senator said the only way to counter this dire threat to democracy is to “build the biggest turnout of voters in history so that the results cannot possibly be questioned.”
Trump’s trumpeting of the SAVE Act, including his demand to listeners to call their lawmakers and demand its immediate passage, shows he wants to take the U.S. back to the days of Jim Crow or worse, commentators said.
Jim Himes, the House Intelligence Committee’s top Democrat, said it shows Trump knows his popularity is shot, his programs are unpopular, and his party will lose in the November elections, so he seeks someone else to blame. It’s an “I told you so,” too, Himes said.
Then Trump will send in troops to seize the ballots, Himes warned. In 2020, Trump advocated for using the military to seize voting machines but was restrained by members of his own administration.
Trump’s speech “was setting the basis for him to turn around, at midnight on Election Day, and say, ‘I warned you, I warned you back in July that the Chinese were doing XYZ and the Venezuelans were doing XYZ and all this terrible stuff. It happened tonight,” Himes elaborated.
So, he continued, Trump will say on Election Night that “I am deploying federal officers from the Department of Homeland Security in seven states. They will be seizing ballot boxes in those states because we know lots of undocumented aliens voted in those states. So we are seizing ballot boxes.” Trump alleged, without proof, that 278,000 undocumented people are registered to vote nationally.
“What happens when all of a sudden we’ve lost the chain of custody of 70 ballot boxes?” Himes added. “That is the moment in which American democracy dies.”
Shanza Hasan at the Brennan Center for Law and Justice said if Trump were really concerned about election integrity and the voting machines, he wouldn’t have zeroed out the Election Assistance Commission, which doles out federal funds to the states so they can harden their systems against fraud and cyberattacks. Trump also fired the commissioners, Hasan noted.
Trump’s current government “depleted its own ability to respond by dismantling centers that tracked foreign influence and hollowing out expertise on information warfare,” Hasan said. “The Trump administration left this year’s congressional races even more susceptible to manipulation by foreign state-sponsored trolls and deepfakes.”
What Trump failed to mention was that the alleged violations of election norms happened in 2020, when his administration was in charge. His own Attorney General, Bill Barr, headed the DOJ at that time and found no evidence of fraud.
He also failed to mention that more than 60 lawsuits his administration filed were dismissed by judges soon after they were filed.
Teachers/AFT President Randi Weingarten, in her keynote address to her union’s convention, a few hours before Trump’s speech, anticipated what the president would say and blasted it, for constitutional reasons.
“When is the erosion so much that we can’t get our freedoms back?” Weingarten, a New York City civics teacher with a law degree, asked. “I remember the scoffing when terms like ‘authoritarian’ were first used. And I have been asked repeatedly about why I used ‘fascist’ in the book I wrote, Why Fascists Fear Teachers. Unfortunately, the answer is clearer every day.”
Robert Weissman and Lisa Gilbert, the co-presidents of Public Citizen, said Trump’s reiterated bleating about 2020 election fraud is designed to distract attention from his unconstitutional war on Iran, rising gas prices, and public worry about jobs and how to pay for rent and health care.
“Trump wants to cast doubt on the security of our elections because he knows things are going so poorly for him amid catastrophic policy failures and plummeting approval ratings,” Weissman explained. “Trump is waging an illegal, unconstitutional, and utterly pointless war that continues to put American and Iranian lives in jeopardy and drive up gas prices.
“Corporations are setting prices out of reach for people being paid too little. Trump rammed through tax cuts for the rich, paid for by cutting health care and food assistance for millions of people. An out-of-control paramilitary force is kidnapping people off our streets and killing them at shocking rates. Trump’s delusional rantings tonight are a transparent effort to distract from these realities.”
Trump spent most of his speech orating about declassifying documents, which he claimed show “United States adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.” He didn’t say how.
Only the Chinese reacted. “China has all along adhered to the principle of non-interference in others’ internal affairs,” Chinese Embassy spokesman Liu Chang said in a statement to USA Today. “The U.S. election is an internal matter of the U.S.,” Liu said. “Its outcome is determined by the votes of the American people. China has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the U.S.”
Trump also charged that two of the over-the-air networks, ABC and NBC, were “part of a conspiracy” to shut him down by not carrying the speech live. He threatened to get the government to pull their broadcast licenses. The two networks carried the speech on streaming video.
Trump insulted his first predecessor, President Barack Obama, by declaring Obama put pro-Trump ballots into burn bags—then didn’t burn them. Obama had no immediate comment.
And Trump again pronounced mail-in voting rife with fraud, citing slow ballot counts in the Los Angeles mayoral primary. His endorsed candidate, xenophobic and right-wing talk show host Spencer Pratt, finished third and missed the runoff there.
Mailed-in ballots, the first to arrive and the last to be counted, pulled an extremely progressive city councilwoman, Nithya Raman, into the November runoff against incumbent moderate-liberal Mayor Karen Bass. Raman overtook Pratt.
And Trump alleged voting machines broke down and “there was even an attempt to manufacture illegal ballots” for Democratic nominee Joe Biden, who defeated him that fall. He offered no proof.
“I’m asking the FBI, the CIA, and the Director of National Intelligence to investigate” all of that. Trump alleged—without evidence—there was a cover-up of election machine failures and of the “deep state’s” refusal to alert him to the problems in daily intelligence briefings in the Oval Office.
The catch to that claim is that recent detailed books about the Trump administration, including interviews with Trump himself, show he doesn’t read the intelligence briefings. He prefers one-page summaries.
Biden’s vice president, Kamala Harris, Trump’s presidential election foe two years ago—who lost—had a short reaction to that and to the entire theme of Trump’s speech:
“The 2020 election was not stolen. We won, and he lost,” Harris said.
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