Red Alert

Trump’s primetime television speech on Thursday 16 July was about ‘election vulnerabilities’, focusing on outside influence primarily from China, and the fallibility of voting machines and processes. Leave aside the fact that the National Intelligence Council report of January 2020, after saying that China, Russia, North Korea and Iran had ‘capability to access and potentially manipulate’ such US election data as centralised voter registration databases and pollbooks, stated that any interference, if it happened, would be localised because elections are run by states and counties in different ways, so that ‘it would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to alter the election outcome’.

Mainly, what Trump revealed in his address was already well known in US intelligence circles. Trump claimed that the intelligence services concealed the information from him. (CNN 17 July 2026).

The big question is: what was the purpose of this primetime address? The most benign interpretation is that it is an attempt to encourage those wavering in support of him and the GOP to vote his way in the Midterms. Part of his pitch was that his wonderful and bigly successes as President have been obscured and information about them perverted by interference activities.

But I worry that this is something different and even more serious: that it is a preparation of the ground for (on an ascending scale) refusing to accept the outcome of the voting in November to suspending the elections in November altogether on ‘national emergency’, ‘cyberwar’ or some such grounds. Like the danger of Putin going for a too literal version of a ‘nuclear option’ if his faltering war-of-choice in Ukraine begins to turn into even more of a defeat, so the danger is that Trump – who is of the same ilk in almost all respects – will go for a ‘nuclear option’ to prevent being turned into a lame-duck President stymied by opposition on the Hill.

And this is a big worry. His speech could well be a Red Alert flashing – not warning about the Chinese ‘Reds’, but a warning about what is being prepared by Trump himself and his embarrassingly knee-bending epigones (not least his testosterone-fuelled drunk ex-tv-host ‘Secretary of War’ whose encouragement of Blue Angel jet fighters blasting the eardrums of Florida beach holidaymakers represents one aspect of the assault on Americans themselves – are the 50 foot flyovers a message? A symbol of what is to come?)

Red Alert, America. If the midterm elections are cancelled, the US is over. To this observer it looks as if plans for the funeral might be in the making. On such matters one would dearly like to be wrong.