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Yesterday, Donald Trump gave a much-touted speech from the White House to discuss “election integrity” ahead of the midterms. Due to his predilection for trying to overturn the results of elections, his remarks attracted quite a lot of attention. Here is some analysis:
Trump’s remarks mostly revolved around the 2020 election, which he maintains that he won. Insofar as there was anything “new” revealed in the speech, it was that it was accompanied by the release of a bunch of newly-declassified government documents which Trump says show that the 2020 election was fishy. Except, they don’t actually show that and they didn’t really contain any new information at all.
Trump’s specific charges were that (a) in 2020, China acquired U.S. voter rolls and “interfered” with the election in some unspecified way; (b) in 2020, Venezuela tampered with U.S. voting machines to manipulate vote tallies; (c) there was a “deep state” coverup of all of this; and (d) 250,000 non-citizens are registered to vote.
On the factual merits, all of this is fairly trivial to dismiss. China may have acquired some U.S. voter information, but much of this is publicly or commercially available anyway. U.S. intelligence concluded in 2021 that China did not try to influence the election, and in the same year that the charge against Venezuela was bogus. If this was all part of a deep state conspiracy, there is zero evidence for it. Finally, the 250,000 “non-citizens registered to vote” allegation is completely unsupported and at odds with historical and publicly-available data.
So why is Trump doing this? One banal reason is that he is trying to place pressure on Congress to pass the Save America Act, a piece of legislation which would (a) require documented proof of U.S. citizenship when registering to vote in U.S. federal elections; (b) require states to submit their voting data to a federal database and then remove non-citizens from their rolls; (c) require photo ID to vote in federal elections. (For some reason, Trump keeps going around saying it would end mail-in voting and ban transgender women from competing in women’s sports, but it actually does neither of those things).
The Save America Act has the same problem as most aggressive voter ID plans. It risks disenfranchising millions of people who do not have easy access to passports or birth certificates, while at the same time being aimed at a problem which mostly does not exist. The number of non-citizens who manage to vote in federal elections is minuscule - one review in Michigan found 16 credible cases out of 5.7 million votes cast. But the struggle over the law, which even some Republicans oppose, has spilled over. It is derailing the GOP’s agenda and has become a major flashpoint between Congress and the president.
So I think the banal, bureaucratic reason that this speech happened is that it was somebody’s idea of how to put pressure on Congress to pass the Save America Act. But the speech and the allegations obviously also raise the prospect that Trump has some long-term plan to try to “steal the midterms” that he is trying to put in motion, starting with whipping up fear and distrust.
As long-term readers of the newsletter will know, I don’t in general believe that Trump does long-term plans. He is not a strategic thinker and has the attention span of a labrador on cocaine. But I think it is still worth examining the speech to see a snapshot of where White House thinking currently is.
If you’re trying to steal an election, it strikes me as somewhat smarter to lean into “the Chinese are trying to destroy our democracy!” versus “a completely undetectable domestic plot run by the deep state and the Democratic Party are trying to steal the election!” If Trump in October 2026 wants to announce that he’s sending ICE or the Kentucky National Guard or whoever to intimidate voters at polling places, a putative Chinese plot is clearly going to make it easier for the Congressional Republican Party to look the other way than some baloney about Michelle Obama.
The irony here is, of course, that it is Trump who has shredded the federal government infrastructure which is designed to safeguard U.S. elections from foreign threats. He has overseen steep cuts to the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, which he hates because it rejected his lies about the 2020 election.
Anyway. On the other hand, the drawback to highlighting the foreign threat is that it’s easier to disprove. If Trump wants to claim a Chinese plot to unseat him, Congress can get on the phone to the CIA and ask them if any such thing is actually happening. The outlandish domestic allegations are like many conspiracy theories: so fantastical and untethered to facts that they are perversely more difficult to dismiss. That’s why they are so often called the Big Lie: belief in them is a sign of being a member of the MAGA club, whose chief requirement is that you believe whatever you are told.
It’s also important to remember that in the United States, it’s not really possible to “steal” an election. Election administration is so decentralized that there are just too many levers to pull to get it done. But what can be done is to introduce such an element of violence and chaos that public trust in the result of the election vanishes, or it comes to be seen as radically incomplete - for instance because federal forces shut down voting in Philadelphia and Detroit, which could alone tip the balance of the House.
So I take this speech as a vague signal about which way the White House is leaning on framing this, and I think that has the pros and cons for them outlined above. But I think it’s too early to point to “a plan” or much more than a vague intent that we know Trump has always had. But I don’t think even he knows what he’s going to do in October or November yet, and whatever it is, he might try it at the very last minute. As a result, it’s going to be a long, angsty wait.
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