Four months away from the critical November mandates, President Donald Trump delivered a primetime speech on Thursday night (July 16) attempting to cast doubt on the integrity of the US election, repeating lies he used about the 2020 race he lost and claiming to have uncovered a vast Chinese conspiracy to interfere with the voting process.
Trump, who has said his administration should “take over” US elections that are currently run by the states, claimed in speaking that the US voting system was “left vulnerable to manipulation and theft” by its political enemies and accused China of “illegally purchasing 220 million US voter records” in an attempt to undermine it.
Trump’s speech coincided with declassification of intelligence allegedly revealing China’s “evil” scheme to disrupt the US election, as well as efforts by “members of the Deep State” to “suppress and downplay” the scheme.
Experts and critics of the president said his speech cherry-picked intelligence agency findings to craft a false, self-serving narrative about the vulnerability of US elections and the need for legislation such as the SAVE America Act. voter suppression bill that Trump has worked obsessively to push Congress.
Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), a senior member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement that Trump “selectively declassified intelligence in an effort to rewrite the history of the election he lost.”
“Even the release of his document does not support his claim that the 2020 election was stolen. It confirms what we have long known: Foreign adversaries targeted our country. democracybut there is no evidence that they changed a single vote or changed the casting or counting of votes,” Krishnamoorthi said.
“President Trump lost the 2020 election. If he cared about election security, he wouldn’t put unqualified political loyalists in charge of our intelligence agencies or weaken the agencies responsible for protecting our elections from foreign threats.”
“Instead,” Krishnamoorthi added, “he is reviving conspiracy theories about mail-in voting, pushing voter suppression and laying the groundwork for unprecedented federal scrutiny of our elections — all while ignoring the real challenges facing American families.”
During his speech, Trump attacked major television news networks for refusing to broadcast his speech live and in full, accusing the media of being “part of the conspiracy” and calling for the “revocation” of NBC and ABC’s broadcast licenses.
Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called Trump’s threat “insane.”
“At a time when millions of Americans are finding it harder to pay for groceries, housing and health carewhen climate crisis is causing record heat waves and forest fires, Donald Trump felt it appropriate tonight to spew conspiracy theories about the 2020 election,” Sanders said. “Pathetically, really authoritarianly, he even threatened to take away the licenses of ABC and NBC because they wouldn’t cover his speech.”
“All of us, regardless of our political views, must stand together against this dangerous president who is seeking to undermine our Constitution and our fundamental freedoms,” Sanders added.
Trump’s speech cited “raw intelligence” that he said shows an attempt by China to “manufacture illegal ballots” for the former president Joe Biden. The president claimed, without evidence, that the intelligence had been “maliciously buried by rogue bureaucrats.”
But, like The Washington Post observed“Raw intelligence reports are often erroneous, incomplete, or contradictory, and intelligence agencies rely on the judgments of expert analysts to verify and aggregate information to draw conclusions with varying degrees of confidence.”
“Officials in 2020 disagreed over whether China wanted Trump to lose and whether Beijing took any steps to undermine him — a controversy noted in a declassified 2021 report. That report outlined the consensus conclusion that neither China nor any other foreign actor had rigged any votes,” the Post noted.
“Hundreds of pages of documents published online by The White House during Trump’s speech did not appear to support Trump’s claim that China interfered in the 2020 election to try to defeat him or that US intelligence officials deliberately withheld information about Beijing’s intentions from him.
Robert Weissman, co-president of the advocacy group Public Citizencharacterized Trump’s speech as an attempt to divert public attention from his administration’s “disastrous policy failures and declining approval ratings.”
“Trump is waging an illegal, unconstitutional and completely pointless war that continues to endanger American and Iranian lives and drive up gas prices. Corporations are setting prices beyond the reach of people who are paid very little,” Weissman said.
“Trump crashed tax cuts for the rich, paid for by cutting health care and food aid for millions upon millions of people. An out-of-control paramilitary force is kidnapping people from our streets and killing them at shocking rates. Trump’s delusional rants tonight are a transparent attempt to distract from these realities.”
Living United for Change in Arizona, a pro-democracy organization, warned that “Trump is trying to end our democracy before our eyes.”
“Tonight Donald Trump stood before the nation and attempted to rewrite history, erase the will of the voters and prepare the country for his next assault on American democracy,” the group said.
“We need to call it what it is. Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to dismantle our elections, overturn results he doesn’t like, override the will of the people and hold on to power by any means necessary.”
