The prospect of fair and unencumbered midterm elections took an ominous turn on Thursday evening following a prime-time television address by US president Donald Trump in which he announced the immediate declassification of documents “revealing vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” and told whatever number of Americans watching that “there is no Third World country that has elections like we have.”
The 27-minute address returned to the theme upon which Trump has fixated for the past six years: his insistent allegation, despite repeated local, state and federal court findings to the contrary, that the 2020 general election was “rigged” in favour of the winner, Joe Biden. Several television networks, including ABC and NBC, opted not to carry the address while CNN aired selected clips while fact-checking Trump’s statements as he spoke.
Trump’s address came less than 24 hours after a deeply unsettling address by Steven Miller. The White House deputy chief of staff for policy announced at a Republican conference, on The Resurgence of Political Terrorism, that the administration has “taken the necessary and essential action of formally recognising left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to national security and the survival of our Republican form of government”.
Trump’s address stated that the newly released documents prove a mass compromise of election data by the People’s Republic of China, involving some 220 million files; that the CIA had evidence of Chinese manipulation in the 2018 midterms and the 2020 election; that China wanted Trump out because “they knew I was wise to them, charged them billions and billions in tariffs and built the largest military in the world.”
RM Block
He claimed American voters have been “blatantly lied to” about the security of electronic voting and ballot-counting systems, alluded to a large-scale voter fraud operation in Michigan and said that the administration is now in the “process of notifying the states whose election data was compromised” and said that it would be “working closely to mitigate harm.”
Homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin would, he said, elaborate on this on Friday. The Chinese embassy in Washington swiftly released a statement denying the allegations, countering that it “has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the US”.
The scenario was a prelude to what stands as Trump’s most direct and formal demand that Republicans in Congress pass the SAVE [Safeguard American Voter Eligibility] America Act.
“This landmark Bill requires that all voters must show photo voter ID,” he said.
“How simple is that?”
The tone and implicit threat contained within the address will alarm those American voters who fear that the biggest threat to free and fair American elections is, in fact, the sitting president. His repeated and insistent claims about the 2020 presidential election were rigorously checked. His refusal to acknowledge Biden as the elected winner has slipped into the Republican vernacular: just this week, the new director of national intelligence nominee, Jay Clayton, declined to answer the question “who won the 2020 election?” – posed by Georgia Democratic senator Jon Ossoff.
Presidential prime-time addresses hold nothing like the shock and awe of old, partly because of the fractured nature of 21st century media and also because Trump is on the television screen more often than reruns of Friends.
But Thursday’s address depicted a president claiming to be a victim of the deep-state machinations as he approaches the two-year mark of his second term in office. His Republican Party has control of the House and the Senate, has a deeply conservative Supreme Court, has enacted its radical global tariff economic policy, has directed lawsuits at educational and media organisations, has embarked on a heavy-handed immigration enforcement campaign leading to widespread protests and several civilian deaths and has pushed through its One Big Beautiful Bill to enact its taxation cuts manifesto.
The administration has stretched the perceived limits of executive power to the maximum, so Trump’s hazy allegations of deep state collusion and obfuscation in an election that is now six years over may have limited impact on his base. They may also recall that Trump was in power during the years of the alleged election fraud.
He also demonstrated an appetite for renewing his war with media outlets deemed hostile to his presidency, alleging that the networks refusing to carry the broadcast were complicit in the wider cover-up.
“Because they know how corrupt our system is and don’t want to reveal it. They and others in the media are part of a plot. They want to continue this fraud for whatever reason; they want to protect the radical left. They can’t have a great country without free and fair elections. Fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licences. They use our public multibillion-dollars-in-values public airwaves for nothing. They pay nothing. Great damage has been done to our country. Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen. And the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue.
“Every American whether Republican, Democrat, Independent or otherwise should be able to agree that we deserve the most honest fair and secure election system anywhere in the world. We should be together. It should not be a partisan issue. We should be united. The only reason you would want to do it [election fraud] is that you want to cheat. That your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get elected any other way.”
Trump’s conspiracy theories drew predictably dismissive responses from liberal commentators but even Fox host Sean Hannity, whose show is generally an unquestioning celebration of the administration, struck a note of caution.
“I’m sure anybody that cares about truth will want to do a deep dive into all of this,” he said on Thursday night.
Trump’s national address could be regarded as a companion piece to Wednesday’s announcement by Miller that the administration will enact a national security presidential memorandum to clamp down on what he called “left-wing terrorism”, warning of a drive to “disrupt, identify, defund, debank, arrest and prosecute these political terrorists operating in our country. Left-wing terrorism always ends in bloodshed, misery and suffering.”
Miller went on to offer a pen-picture of the typical leftist as somebody “who looks at what is beautiful and what is good and what is natural and is filled with envy and hatred”.
“The leftist looks at a perfect family with the perfect life and the perfect job and perfect kids and [that] goes to church every Sunday and is filled with a feeling of inadequacy and jealousy, and they covet, and they turn those emotions into a desire to subjugate and suppress and inflict pain and suffering.
“It is not a coincidence that when you look at these violent Antifa demonstrations, you see any photograph of those assembled: to be blunt, not one of the people that is demonstrating looks like a normal person. Not one looks normal. They are all deformed in some way – in their appearance, in their dress, in their mannerism.”
Miller pre-empted concerns about civil rights campaigns and protests threatened by the new clampdown by claiming that one of “the hallmarks of left-wing violence” lies in “its completely pretextual and disingenuous appeal to civil liberties in an effort to shield its own violence”. He told that international gathering that “we must stay the course and be completely unflinching in the pursuit of justice against these enemies of civilisation.”
The implied threat to future anti-administration or civil-rights protests is clear here. Trump’s blatant declaration of a US election system that is broken and corrupt will also set alarm bells ringing. Unlike 2020, he is not waiting for the votes to be counted, or even cast, this time round.
