The Silver Lining of Trump’s Reheated Election Denialism

Take Trump seriously. Take him literally. But also see his speech for what it is: He knows he’s losing.

By Brian Tyler Cohen, The Bulwark

HOURS BEFORE DONALD TRUMP addressed the nation Thursday night, his press secretary Karoline Leavitt promised he would deliver shocking claims.

They did not materialize.

What we got instead was reheated election conspiracy theories in a winding, largely nonsensical speech that several media outlets saw little value in airing live.

In it, Trump claimed that China gained access to more than 200 million voter files (in most states, voter data can be freely downloaded online; in some states, it is available for purchase). He claimed that Venezuela plotted to manipulate its domestic voting technology (this scheme, according to the CIA, could not be replicated abroad). He claimed that more than a quarter of a million noncitizens are on the voter rolls (a number that seems to be exaggerated by about 99.96 percent—or 900 percent if you’re a fan of Trump math).

The speech was so flat that Fox & Friends failed to to mention it even once during their broadcast the next morning. Apparently, the network felt that the prospect of another $787 million lawsuit wasn’t worth re-engaging in tired 2020 election denialism.

And yet, the Trump speech was shocking in ways that Leavitt probably didn’t envision or intend.

The address made clear that the president is hellbent on attempting to seize control of how elections are run in this country. His Department of Justice is suing thirty states plus Washington, D.C. for their unredacted voter rolls, for which they are currently 0–16 in court. His Department of Homeland Security is demanding access to run those rolls through citizenship-verification systems that keep wrongly flagging eligible voters. White House officials refuse to rule out the possibility of sending ICE agents to the polls. And Trump wants the voter-suppressing SAVE America Act to pass so badly that he was willing to sacrifice his housing bill for it. Hell, he exploited the death of Lindsey Graham to push it—unless, of course, you believe that Graham’s dying words to Trump were indeed that he wants to see the SAVE America Act passed.

The good news, for now, is none of it is working. But that just means Trump is going to swing for the fences. The Washington Post reported back in February that Trump allies have drafted a seventeen-page executive order that would let him declare a national emergency over supposed foreign election interference. But even Trump understands that he needs a pretext, flimsy though it may be. Thursday’s speech is his effort to create exactly that. It was the foundation to try and claim fraud. It was him gearing up to declare that the system is broken and China or Venezuela or [insert foreign country here] will interfere in our elections and, as such, I have no choice but to take extraordinary action to prevent that from happening again! Is he being honest? Not at all. But Trump doesn’t need to be. He’s post-truth. He just needs people to believe the lie. After all, remember this statement from the aftermath of the 2020 election: “Just say the election was corrupt and leave the rest to me and the Republican congressmen.”