The Daily Mail called it the “day of revelation.” Meanwhile, in the hours leading up to this Thursday’s address by the White House occupant, CBS, now owned by David Ellison, a supporter of Donald Trump, and Fox said they would broadcast the U.S. president’s speech live in primetime, unlike rival networks ABC and NBC, which decided to relegate the president’s statements to their streaming platforms.
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CNN, for its part, also decided not to present its viewers with the prepared speech “of a president known for his incessant lies,” particularly on the likely topic of the speech: his defeat to Joe Biden in the 2020 presidential election, “which seems to have inflicted such a severe psychological wound on him that Trump is unable to overcome it,” highlighted The Guardian newspaper.
And the media’s apprehensions seemed confirmed once Trump delivered his 25-minute speech, which, according to The Wall Street Journal, “opened Pandora’s box in electoral matters.”
The Republican president announced his particular “day of revelation” by revealing the alleged vulnerabilities of the U.S. electoral system and the irregularities, according to him, of the 2020 elections in which he lost to Joe Biden. The president made unprecedented accusations of Chinese interference, with “buying and hacking data” of 220 million voters and “paying journalists” to publish negative articles about him.
In summary, according to CNN, Trump “tried to convince Americans that their elections are vulnerable to fraud and require immediate attention. While he did not repeat his usual mantra that he actually won the 2020 presidential election he lost, Trump did declassify documents that, according to him, demonstrated a Chinese influence campaign, a cover-up by U.S. intelligence officials, and fraud in Michigan.”
From Beijing, the response came immediately. “The relevant accusations from the United States are completely fabricated and aimed at defaming China,” said Chinese Foreign Ministry spokesperson Lin Jian. “We have no interest in interfering in U.S. elections and never have,” he reiterated.
He added that, on the contrary, the international community knows who habitually interferes in the internal affairs of other countries.
Meanwhile, Kremlin spokesperson Dmitry Peskov stated that Moscow categorically rejected all accusations of interference in past elections. A 2021 U.S. intelligence community assessment determined that Russia carried out influence operations aimed at discrediting Biden’s campaign but concluded that no foreign actor, including China, attempted to alter any technical aspect of the 2020 electoral process, The Guardian reported.
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In fact, CNN said the evidence listed by Trump in his speech, mainly presented in emails with a large amount of censored information and taken out of context, did not support his claims. “However, they will undoubtedly serve as a pretext for Trump’s efforts to restrict mail-in voting and add new identification requirements for voters,” the network warned.
And fears point in that direction. According to The Guardian, Trump’s speech “blatantly sought to destabilize the U.S. electoral system.” “The U.S. president uses his office and intelligence agencies to try to undermine confidence in the elections ahead of the midterms,” the newspaper noted in reference to the upcoming November elections.
Along the same lines, Peter Baker, chief correspondent for The New York Times at the White House, said that “by demanding measures to address voting integrity, President Trump persisted in reopening the debate over his 2020 election defeat while seeking ways to sow doubt about the 2026 outcome.” For Baker, this is “a Trump obsession that comes at a cost to democracy.”
In the hours before the president’s speech, Ty Cobb, the lawyer who coordinated Donald Trump’s legal response during his first term to the special counsel’s investigation into his campaign’s ties with Russia, told PBS News Hour that he feared the president’s address intended “to reinforce the idea that he needs to declare a state of emergency during election times or close to them.”
Cobb, who has become a critic of the president, predicted that Trump will try “anything” to disrupt the midterm elections that his party is expected to lose, opening the door to a third impeachment.
“Steve Bannon and Todd Blanche have hinted that there will be ICE agents at polling stations,” Cobb said. “I think it’s practically certain. We don’t know if it will include the National Guard, but he will do everything possible to intimidate minority voters, particularly immigrants.” He also suggested that the president was looking for an excuse “to try to confiscate voting machines, as Trump wanted to do in 2020.”
“I think we will see him doing everything possible to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, the election of the Democrats, and doing whatever it takes to stay in power and keep his allies, so he can continue doing what he believes he is allowed to do as president, which is whatever he pleases,” Cobb added.
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