Almost nothing has spurred political polarization during the Trump era more than the subject of elections. And President Donald Trump, who has spent much of his political career saying American elections can’t be trusted, appears ready to go to that well again Thursday night when he delivers a primetime address to the nation.
Outside observers expect the president’s speech to be peppered with claims of tampering by state election officials and a rigged system for administering elections — much of which he’s said before and has been debunked in dozens of court cases since 2020.
“As usual, anonymous sources are speculating about what President Trump will say during his speech on Thursday evening,” White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told NOTUS. “The truth is, nobody knows yet what President Trump will ultimately say, which is why everyone should tune in.”
Even after winning reelection and seeing Republicans gain control of both congressional chambers in 2024, the president has not backed off the rhetoric of widespread electoral theft that ramped up after his loss in 2020. In June, Trump launched claims about rigged primaries in California, echoing previous claims he’s made about the state that historically has counted its ballots more slowly than any other.
Trump has kept distrust of the electoral process front and center for his supporters and allies. But significant policy changes remain largely out of reach, election watchers say.
Despite multiple executive orders, Justice Department actions, key agency shakeups and pressure on Congress to enact a wide-ranging voter citizenship bill, Trump so far has been unsuccessful at expanding the executive branch’s power over administering federal, state and local elections.
“If his goals were to undermine election security in the states, he’s failed. If his goals were to seize power over elections through executive order, he’s failed. If his goals were to seize sensitive voter data from the states, he’s failed. If his goal was to pass the SAVE America Act, he’s failed,” said David Becker, founder and executive director of the nonprofit Center for Election Innovation & Research. “I can’t think of a single victory he’s had in this space, not one.”
Now, it appears Trump will consolidate his administration’s message that elections need to be fixed and that the federal government should be the entity to make those fixes, and put it directly to the American people in a televised address.
“It’s really, really big news, and our country has to shape up,” Trump told reporters in the Oval Office on Tuesday. “But that’s what we’re going to be talking about Thursday. It doesn’t get bigger because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.”
Since returning to the White House, the president has issued two executive actions aimed at requiring proof of citizenship to vote, although each has been blocked by the courts. The administration has hollowed out the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, the unit under the Department of Homeland Security tasked with helping secure elections. And he recently fired two Democratic members of the Election Assistance Commission after the lone remaining Republican member resigned. The move completely vacated the federal agency that determines election management guidelines.
The DOJ has been the epicenter of Trump’s efforts to scrutinize the results of the 2020 election and remake the administration of future ones. Ahead of the midterms in November, the Justice Department canceled election-integrity training sessions for prosecutors and FBI agents, deleted a 281-page guide to prosecuting election offenses and fired most of the lawyers in its Public Integrity Section, among other actions, NOTUS reported last month.
And perhaps the most striking statistic: As of Tuesday, the DOJ has lost 15 consecutive lawsuits seeking to access unredacted voter rolls from individual states.
“0-15 should never happen. What that means is you brought frivolous cases, and then, in addition to having brought the frivolous cases, when you were getting handed defeat after defeat after defeat, no, there’s no grown-up there to review this and say, ‘Hey, wait a second, should we reel this in?’ ” Becker, who is also a former DOJ lawyer, told NOTUS. “The president has actually undermined his own efforts because there’s not an election official in the country that’s scared of the DOJ right now.”
The FBI has investigated right-wing theories that Dominion Voting Systems machines were hacked by Venezuela and has raided an elections office in Georgia on similar suspicions. Those unsubstantiated claims were at the heart of a lawsuit that Dominion brought against Fox News that was settled for $787 million in 2023.
The Trump administration and the Republican National Committee, which has been at the forefront of election-related court battles, have notched some wins, including the Supreme Court’s decisions to weaken the Voting Rights Act.
“President Trump is more focused than any prior president on preserving the integrity of American elections,” Jason Snead, the executive director of the nonpartisan advocacy group Honest Elections Project, told NOTUS in a statement. “The contrast with the left could not be more profound. Democratic politicians, activists, and lawyers have spent decades and countless millions of dollars suing to dismantle even the most basic election safeguards, advocating for noncitizen voting.”
Trump has voiced a belief that the election system is rigged throughout his entire career in politics. In 2016, Trump claimed Sen. Ted Cruz “illegally stole” the Iowa caucuses from him and called the Republican primaries “rigged and boss controlled.” More recently, Trump has claimed that California election officials rigged the Los Angeles mayoral election against Republican candidate Spencer Pratt.
And even though dozens of lawsuits contesting the 2020 presidential election results were dismissed or dropped for lack of evidence or standing — some by judges Trump appointed — the president remains fixated on a theory that his loss that year was the result of a conspiracy against him.
“I would focus more on the actions than on the rhetoric,” Richard Hasen, an election law professor at UCLA, said of Trump’s upcoming address. “I think the rhetoric is old, and I don’t think he’s going to convince people by claiming some kind of conspiracy, especially in 2020, which is probably the most investigated election in American history.”
On Capitol Hill, Republican lawmakers were hesitant to comment or speculate on Trump’s address.
“I happened to talk to him this morning. He didn’t mention it,” Sen. John Kennedy, R-Louisiana, said Wednesday. “I didn’t ask him, so I have no idea. It’ll be like a box of chocolates. You never know what you’re going to get.”
Told that the speech would focus at least in part on the 2020 election, Kennedy declined to comment because he didn’t know what exactly the president was going to say.
Despite the Oval Office’s struggles to wrangle control of the electoral system, Trump’s consistent claim that voting in America is “rigged” has had a major impact on the most important part of the process: voting itself. A veteran nonpartisan election administration policy expert, deeply plugged into election administration across the country, told NOTUS that the president’s focus on the SAVE America Act — and the evidence-free claim undergirding it that millions of undocumented immigrants could illegally cast ballots unless it is passed — has once again kicked up death threats against the civil servants who organize and manage balloting.
“It is absolutely true that the national conversation drives what is happening in states,” said the expert, who spoke on the condition of anonymity out of fear of professional retaliation.
Trump’s speech, coming scant months ahead of the midterms for which federal election administrators have spent months planning, could have a dramatic effect. It’s too late for wholesale changes, the election expert said, but there is plenty of time to foster distrust.
“I know it’s a little pedantic, but it’s the thing that worries me a lot,” the expert said. “How scary the narrative is. If I didn’t understand, how uncertain would I be feeling about participating in November?”
This story was produced as part of a partnership between NOTUS — a publication from the nonpartisan Allbritton Journalism Institute — and NEWSWELL, home of Times of San Diego, Santa Barbara News-Press and Stocktonia.
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