President Donald Trump used a primetime White House address on Thursday to renew his push for sweeping changes to US election laws, while accusing China of interfering in the 2020 presidential race and warning of what he described as “shocking vulnerabilities” in American voting systems. The half-hour speech came three months before November’s midterm elections, which will determine control of Congress for the remainder of Trump’s presidency.
Democrats quickly accused him of trying to undermine public confidence in the vote before ballots are cast.
“He wants you to lose confidence in our electoral system, so you stay home this November,” former Vice President Kamala Harris wrote on X shortly before Trump began speaking.
Trump ended the address by urging Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, legislation that would prohibit most mail voting, require people to provide proof of citizenship when registering to vote and mandate photo identification at the polls. The bill has been stalled in the Senate for months.
Some prominent Republicans have also urged Trump to acknowledge that the legislation currently lacks a viable path through Congress. Trump encouraged Americans to contact their representatives and demand its passage. But the legislation is unlikely to advance unless Republicans are also prepared to abandon longstanding Senate procedures.
Trump suggested that resistance to the bill could only be motivated by an intention to commit fraud.
“How easy is that to do? Unless you want to cheat,” Trump said. “The only reason you wouldn’t do it is you want to cheat because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic that you can’t get elected any other way.”
The president’s renewed focus on election security is likely to deepen Democratic concerns that he is laying the groundwork to dispute the legitimacy of the November midterms and, potentially, the 2028 presidential election.
“Put together, these disclosures reveal an election system so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it,” he said. “It is not defensible.”
He went on to claim that US elections were “worse than any Third World country.”
Trump said the federal government would work with states to reduce potential risks and act quickly to strengthen protections for sensitive voter information. He did not announce plans for more aggressive federal involvement in local election administration, such as changing state voting procedures or deploying troops to polling locations, steps some critics had feared.
“Let’s be clear – in America, voters choose their leaders, not the other way around,” Senate Democratic leader Chuck Schumer posted on social media after the address.
“Democrats will fight like hell to make sure every American voter can cast their ballot freely, without obstruction or interference from Donald Trump,” he added.
Democratic governors from all 24 states led by members of their party also issued a joint statement accusing Trump of seeking to “intimidate and silence voters.”
“It’s deeply alarming that President Trump continues to try to undermine free and fair elections. No amount of lies and conspiracy theories can change the fact that our country’s elections have repeatedly been proven to be safe and secure.”
Trump spoke from the White House with several senior members of his administration seated nearby. Journalists were not given an opportunity to question the president after the address.
During his remarks, Trump said he had ordered the declassification of hundreds of intelligence files that he claimed supported his allegation that Beijing tried to influence the 2020 election in favor of Joe Biden.
Trump said the documents had been concealed from both him and the public and claimed they demonstrated that the American election system fell “catastrophically short” of the necessary standard.
The White House released hundreds of pages of documents while Trump was speaking, though many were heavily redacted.
An initial review by CNN found that much of the material concerned vulnerabilities that were already publicly known or had been discussed in the intelligence community’s 2021 election assessment. Some of the released information also appeared not to have undergone extensive verification, and Trump himself referred at one point to “raw intelligence.”
Trump alleged that China had engaged in the “illicit acquisition” of 220 million US voter files containing personal information.
He claimed that voter information from 18 states had been “bought, stolen or hacked by China” and accused “those responsible for sounding the alarm” of failing to share the discovery with government officials or members of Congress.
Much voter registration information is publicly accessible, however, and Trump did not present evidence during the speech showing that China had used the data to manipulate voting machines, alter ballots or change the outcome of an election.
Trump has repeatedly promoted unsubstantiated claims about voter fraud and foreign interference in the 2020 election, which he lost to Biden. Following that election, Trump and his allies filed dozens of legal challenges seeking to overturn the result. Those efforts were unsuccessful, and no evidence of widespread fraud capable of changing the outcome was found.
The president’s claims directly conflict with previous conclusions reached by the US intelligence community. The US Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency described the 2020 contest as “the most secure in American history” and said no voting systems had been compromised.
Trump also referenced intelligence from 2019 suggesting China sought to weaken domestic confidence in him, but efforts to influence public perceptions are not necessarily evidence that Beijing interfered with voting or altered an election outcome.
A 2021 assessment from the US National Intelligence Council said analysts had “high confidence” that China did not interfere in the 2020 presidential election.
The assessment had already concluded that China probably continued a longstanding effort to collect information about American voters, public opinion, political parties, candidates, campaign staff and senior government officials.
According to the assessment, Beijing had gathered such information since at least 2008 to better understand how it could influence US policy, but the intelligence community distinguished those collection efforts from direct interference in the 2020 election.
“We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US presidential election.”
It concluded that Beijing probably held back because China “did not view either election outcome as being advantageous enough for China to risk blowback if caught.”
China’s foreign ministry rejected the allegations on Friday, describing the claims of interference in the 2020 presidential election as “entirely fabricated”.
Foreign ministry spokesman Lin Jian called Trump’s allegations “malicious smears” that had “long been proven to be groundless”.
After the address, conservative journalist John Solomon, who helped the White House release the intelligence documents, acknowledged that officials had “zero evidence that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, 2022 or 2024.”
Former Attorney General William Barr and other officials appointed during Trump’s first term have also rejected his claims that the 2020 election was stolen. Courts considering fraud allegations brought by Trump and his allies found that virtually none had merit.
Elsewhere in Thursday’s address, Trump claimed American voting machines remain “extremely exposed” to interference by foreign adversaries, including Russia, China and Iran.
Weaknesses in US election infrastructure have been documented for years, and some were addressed following the 2016 presidential election, which Trump won. The US intelligence community determined that Russia had carried out a coordinated campaign to interfere in that election. The effort included hacking operations, social media influence campaigns and financial support for election-related activities inside the United States.
Trump then used the speech to raise allegations about a voter registration investigation in Michigan, claiming that state law enforcement officials had uncovered a registration fraud operation involving a group affiliated with Democrats, but that the FBI prevented investigators from acting before the statute of limitations expired.
“It was pay, play and cheat,” Trump said.
He did not provide evidence that any ballots had been altered, that vote totals had been changed or that voting machines had been hacked as part of the alleged scheme.
The Michigan investigation was also already publicly known, although Trump characterized it as a concealed matter. He said he would direct FBI Director Kash Patel to examine how the case had been handled.
Trump separately claimed that the Department of Homeland Security had identified 278,000 non-citizens who were registered to vote. He did not say whether any of those individuals had cast ballots, whether the registrations were improper, or whether they affected the outcome of any election.
Evidence indicates that voting by non-citizens is exceedingly rare, despite the issue becoming a central part of the Republican campaign for the SAVE America Act.
Broadcasters faced a decision over whether to provide live primetime coverage without knowing the contents of a speech focused on a subject about which Trump has repeatedly made false statements. Previous primetime addresses by Democratic presidents, including Barack Obama and Joe Biden, were also not carried by every television network.
Trump criticized ABC, NBC and CNN for declining to air the speech live and said their broadcast licenses should be revoked.
White House spokesman Steven Cheung called the broadcasters that declined to televise the address “cowards” and accused them of trying to prevent the public from hearing the truth.
Shortly after beginning the speech, however, Trump falsely claimed that he had inherited the highest inflation in 48 years and that the Biden administration had allowed more than 11,000 murderers to enter the country.
The speech comes after a release of a Washington Post-Ipsos poll showing his approval rating had fallen to 37%. Many voters remained pessimistic about the cost of living and the continuing war with Iran.
An April Reuters-Ipsos poll found that 31% of Americans believed the 2020 election had been stolen from Trump, while 64% disagreed.
Public opinion was more divided on non-citizen voting. The same survey found that 46% of respondents believed a large number of fraudulent ballots had been cast by non-US citizens.
Although that concern could give Trump a larger audience for his broader election-security arguments, the SAVE America Act does not appear to be a leading priority for most Americans outside the president’s conservative base.
Despite Trump’s presentation of the declassified files as new evidence, his speech did not establish that foreign actors changed vote totals in 2020 or that fraud affected the election’s result.
The newly released documents and Trump’s broader allegations are nevertheless expected to intensify the political fight over voting rules and election administration in the months before the midterms.
Moumita Basuroychowdhury is a Contributing Reporter at The National Digest. After earning an economics degree at Cornell University, she moved to NYC to pursue her MFA in creative writing. She enjoys reporting on science, business and culture news. You can reach her at moumita.b@thenationaldigest.com.
