WASHINGTON — President Trump used a rare prime-time address Thursday night to renew his attacks on the security of U.S. elections, telling Americans that the nation’s voting system is “so broken” that “no one can possibly defend it,” a striking effort by a sitting president to undermine public confidence in domestic elections.
Trump asserted that the U.S. election system was “dangerously” exposed to potential foreign hacking, including by China, and said he had directed the White House to release a tranche of heavily redacted documents that purport to show “vulnerabilities” in the nation’s voting system.
But many of his claims, which echo his assertions after losing the 2020 election, have been debunked by investigations, audits or court proceedings. His warnings that the nation’s elections could be vulnerable to foreign influence have long been made by members of both parties, and he made no claims Thursday that foreign actors had changed vote counts or hacked election systems.
Trump amplified his assertions in an apparent effort to cast fresh doubt over what he said was a “stolen” and “rigged” election and renew calls for Congress to pass a federal voting law ahead of the November election.
“This evidence shows that the election system we have dangerously exposes and really exposes levels never thought possible to hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference,” Trump claimed.
The 26-minute address to the nation — a platform traditionally reserved for rare moments of national importance — comes after a series of steps by Trump in his second term to assert more federal control over elections before the November midterm elections, which are less than four months away.
Last week, Trump fired all remaining members of the bipartisan U.S. Elections Assistance Commission, a federal agency that helps states improve their voting systems and distributed election security grants to help protect state elections from foreign and domestic cyberattacks, among other things.
The Justice Department has also attempted to force states to turn over their voter rolls, an effort that more than a dozen courts have now ruled against, and said it would send election monitors to some states. Trump claimed states are refusing to turn over their voter rolls because he alleged noncitizens are registered to vote in their elections.
The president used California, a favorite target, to hint that Democrats were cheating. He cast doubt on California’s vote count in June’s primary election, saying, “It took a month to count the votes. I wonder what they were doing.”
The state’s vote count takes multiple weeks under the current system; it is not a sign of fraud.
Trump delivered the address with his approval rating stagnating at 37%, according to a Washington Post-Ipsos poll released Thursday, and with weakening enthusiasm among Republicans.
Democrats swiftly condemned Trump’s claims as baseless and a rehash of ideas that have little to do with actual election administration.
“Donald Trump is releasing unverified, meaningless documents to appease his own delusions about an election he lost resoundingly, all while continuing to withhold 3 million pages of the Epstein files,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer said on X.
Multiple reviews of the 2020 election have concluded that Joe Biden won legitimately, and election experts say there is no evidence that widespread fraud affected the outcome of the election. Trump’s own attorney general in his first term, William Barr, said at the time that his department found no evidence of widespread voter fraud that could have changed the outcome of the election.
“It’s been more than half a decade, with numerous audits, recounts, and more than 60 court cases, each finding no evidence of widespread voter fraud,” Sen. Alex Padilla (D-Calif.) said of the 2020 election in a statement. “Clearly, this is no longer about an election Donald Trump lost six years ago. It’s about him laying the groundwork to try to ‘take over the voting’ in the upcoming midterm elections.”
Sue Gordon, who served as principal deputy director of national intelligence during Trump’s first term, said most of the data Trump will release has already been assessed by the intelligence community.
“Since 2016, the intelligence community has been saying that foreign actors intended to influence our election for the purpose of undermining democracy — not undermining a president, undermining democracy,” Gordon told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins after the address.
“This is not a new threat. It was one he certainly knew of. He had an entire term to deal with it,” Gordon said, “and I don’t know how you can believe that the same community who told him about it … then somehow didn’t tell him about further attempts.”
Major broadcast networks declined to air Trump’s speech in full, instead reporting on it. Trump complained about NBC and ABC as he spoke, saying they should lose their broadcasting licenses. He falsely claimed that “they and others in the media are part of a plot” to “continue this fraud.”
In his remarks, Trump alleged China carried out what is believed to be the “largest compromise of election data history” starting during the 2020 election cycle and claimed that “members of the deep state” in the American intelligence community covered it up.
Trump said China had accessed voter data of 220 million people in 18 states, but that information is generally publicly available and does not contain information that would allow a bad actor to change votes or hack into an election system.
He directed the FBI, the director of national intelligence and other agencies led by some of his loyalists to investigate and prosecute the people responsible for the alleged cover-up.
Foreign adversaries have made known attempts to influence election outcomes, but there is no evidence that adversaries have ever breached voting systems or altered votes, something that would be extraordinarily difficult to do without notice, elections experts told The Times this week.
Trump did not mention Russia, which has made attempts to influence U.S. elections through social media or disinformation. In 2016, Russia interfered in the presidential election in an attempt to sway the contest in Trump’s favor, multiple U.S. assessments found in the years following the election.
China was not found to have interfered with election processes or infrastructure in an intelligence report released in March 2021, and the information Trump provided Thursday did not appear to contradict that.
The idea that China may have attempted to influence voters via social media or public statements is not new. In April 2020, an intelligence assessment determined that Chinese intelligence officials analyzed voter registration data from multiple states, according to a report that was declassified in 2022.
After the 2020 election, whether China attempted influence was the subject of debate. The intelligence report concluded it had only considered trying to influence voters, but the national intelligence officer for cyber issues took a “minority view” in the report, assessing that China took “at least some steps to undermine” Trump’s reelection chance.
“Trump’s shocking ‘bombshells’ about China are totally bogus,” Sen. Mark Warner (D-Va.), vice chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said on X. “The fact is our intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that China did not even try to change a single vote in the 2020 election.”
Obtaining a list of voter data alone does not enable someone to change votes, said David Becker, executive director of the nonpartisan Center for Election Innovation and Research. The data are largely public and often used by campaigns and researchers; a bad actor would have to take further steps to affect an election.
“If anyone got into our voter databases and altered data on a scale that could change the election outcome, it would be obvious … because we would get reports of tens or hundreds of thousands of people having trouble voting,” Becker said.
The president also used the address to pressure Republican lawmakers to pass a voter ID law that has stalled in Congress and that voting rights advocates have warned could make it harder for millions of Americans to register to vote or cast a ballot. Democrats oppose the legislation, but it also has not gained enough support among Senate Republicans to pass.
“Addressing this crisis of elections security demands that Congress will pass the SAVE America Act,” Trump said. “How easy is that to do? Unless you want to cheat.”
Some congressional Republicans praised Trump on social media and echoed his claims to pass the legislation.
“It is more important than ever to crush foreign election interference,” Rep. Mike Lee (R-Utah) said on X. “It is more important than ever to pass the SAVE AMERICA ACT.”
Ahead of the speech, elections and democracy experts had cautioned that the president may attempt to sow doubt about the security of the nation’s election system or bolster debunked fraud claims.
Some experts said Thursday’s address could be interpreted as a sign that Trump is running out of moves in the lead-up to the midterm elections, where Republican control of the House is at stake.
“The fact that they’re throwing everything up on the walls at this point demonstrates panic,” Becker said. “They are not operating from strength right now. They are operating from weakness.”
