It is unusual for the President of the United States to request that the major television networks suspend their prime-time programming to transmit a message from the Oval Office of the White House.
When it occurs, it is a solemn occasion, whether it is informing the nation that the president has decided to wage war or seeking to reassure the population as the country faces a national tragedy. Customarily, millions will tune in to hear the calming words of the executive in chief explaining a national crisis and offering a level-headed, measured response.
That certainly was not the case on the evening of Thursday, July 16, when President Trump spoke to the country by spouting an endless string of false statements, unfounded accusations, and recycled conspiracy theories to justify his insistent claim that he really won the 2020 election and that the “Deep State” had hidden the truth from him and the country until he recently discovered its machinations.
On one level, his disjointed address to the nation was a xenophobic tirade against the People’s Republic of China, alleging that they had interfered in the 2020 elections. He also waged yet another unsubstantiated attack on immigrants (that is, Latin Americans), contending that tens of thousands of non-citizens had illegally voted in recent elections.
Yet, his rant seems to have had other purposes. Trump has recently lamented that if Democrats win control of the House of Representatives in the upcoming November 3 congressional elections, they will initiate a third impeachment attempt against the president.
So, in recent months, Trump has pressured Republicans to change congressional district boundaries to favor his party in hotly contested races. He has endorsed far-right challengers against a handful of Republican critics of his policies in primary elections, eliminating the possibility that his intra-party opponents will challenge their Democratic rivals in November.
State of emergency, threats to the Postal Service and from ICE agents: Trump’s election plan
Now, he is doing everything possible to lay the groundwork to interfere in the upcoming electoral contest. Political observers fear that he plans to seize voting machines in contested electoral districts, alleging voter fraud, or declare a “State of Emergency” to manipulate the electoral results.
He has threatened to compel the U.S. Postal Service to refuse to send mail-in ballots (a common practice in many states) unless Democratic governors turn over voters’ rolls so that the Department of Justice can supposedly weed out people illegally registered to vote. And, despite federal legislation prohibiting the practice, he seems ready to send state-controlled National Guard units from Republican-dominated states or federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to districts where his candidates might lose to the Democrats as a means of intimidating voters from going to the polls.
Rather than a tempered speech to win the confidence of the country regarding his claims of electoral insecurity, Trump’s paranoid rantings merely suggest that he intends to do everything in his power to steal the November elections. Blame China, blame immigrants, blame Democrats; it is a familiar discourse. Trump inevitably blames others for what he intends to do himself.
However, other than his loyal base, which would, like lemmings, follow him over a cliff, no one is buying his latest pack of lies. Two of the three major television networks declined to transmit the speech. Cable TV channels show clips but spend most of the time debunking his misstatements and outright lies. Although Fox News broadcast the entire 25-minute speech, its commentators, usually quick to back up every word spewed by the president, afterward declined to confirm the veracity of his claims. The following day, they didn’t mention the speech at all.
At the end of his diatribe, Trump called on the Republicans to support his “Save America Act,” which should have been named the “Save Trump Act”, because it is designed to disenfranchise millions of voters, most of whom are Democrats or independents and are inclined to vote against the candidates supported by the president. Even though Republican leaders in the Senate have repeatedly warned Trump that they don’t have the votes to pass the bill into law, Trump, like a stubborn bulldog hanging onto the pants of a postal worker trying to deliver mail, refuses to give up.
The president is in a panic, and he has reason to be
There is reason for him to be in panic mode, willing to do anything, legal or not, to eke out an electoral victory ten days after the second round of the Brazilian elections. His approval rating is at an all-time low: 36% of respondents approve of his administration and 59% disapprove—a figure similar to the level of opposition to the war in Iran. His decision to resume attacks on Iran triggered a new spike in fuel prices, further driving up inflation and undermining his popularity.
Election experts distinguish between two different phenomena that Trump rolled into one during his nearly half-hour festival of lies. The first is the efforts by foreign governments hostile to the United States to influence election outcomes; the second is hacking into hundreds of election systems to switch votes and change the actual results.
Although there are documented attempts by foreign powers to influence U.S. citizens’ voting behavior by disseminating fake news and disinformation campaigns on social media, there is absolutely zero evidence that a single vote cast in the 2020, 2022, or 2024 elections was changed by anyone, whether foreign or domestic.
There is convincing evidence that Russia favored Trump in the 2016 elections with a major operation designed to circulate false information that would favor the current president.
Trump’s public call for Russia to hack the records of the Democratic Party resulted in the release of internal party information showing that its leadership used the party apparatus to favor Hillary Clinton over Bernie Sanders, causing the resignation of Congresswoman Debbie Wasserman-Schultz, the Democratic Party National Chairwoman. The Department of Justice also brought charges against an entire clandestine operation in Moscow involved in attempting to influence the election outcome.
However, after Trump won in 2016, his administration found no evidence that a single vote had been switched from one candidate to another. When Trump lost the 2020 elections, his campaign lost 61 different court appeals in which he alleged that the results were manipulated against him. Now he is claiming that his enemies in the “Deep State”, supposedly anti-Trump Democrats, hid the information from him during his first four years in power.
Foreign election influencing is nothing new to the United States. As I documented in the book, Apesar de vocês: a oposição à ditadura militar nos Estados Unidos, the U.S. government did the same in the 1962 Brazilian gubernatorial elections, spending an estimated $5 million (today the equivalent of $30 million) to support opponents of the government of João Goulart, with mixed results. No doubt, different U.S. administrations have done the same throughout the world through the CIA or a front organization.
However, Trump has insisted that the People’s Republic of China has “bought, stolen, or hacked” voter data from 18 states without explaining what they would do with this information.
The vagueness of this accusation obscures the fact that anyone—U.S. citizen or otherwise — can buy voter rolls in most states, a common practice for candidates seeking to reach voters through mailings or door-to-door contact. Anyone can easily obtain the name, address, party affiliation, and even in some cases whether or not a person voted (but not for whom they cast their ballot), because normally a person comes to the polls, shows some identification, signs their name in a special log, is given a paper ballot or votes electronically, and then casts their vote in a closed booth. Because of electoral transparency, those logs are public records that anyone can access by going to a local government office in charge of the elections.
After I returned from six years in Brazil in the late 1970s and early 1980s, I lived in California, where I ran for the House of Representatives on the Peace and Freedom Party ticket, an independent left-wing party founded within the political upheavals of the late 1960s. I even won 5% of the vote in 1982. However, in an election system where two parties dominate and there is no proportional representation, my results were, at best, rather symbolic.
Yet, my electoral campaign bought voter information from my district, which covered Hollywood, and our campaign contacted Democratic voters to see if they would cast a protest vote for the Peace and Freedom Party and in favor of our social democratic program. I suppose the Chinese might try to do the same, but I’m not sure how effective their efforts would be.
In Trump’s speech, he claimed that more than 220,000 non-citizens (read undocumented Latinos) voted in recent elections, offering no proof. Reputable organizations that track election security repeatedly report that there is virtually no voter fraud by people ineligible to cast a ballot. Again, my own experiences in California confirm these carefully executed studies. In some states, you need to get a certain number of signatures from members of your party to be an eligible candidate. Since the Peace and Freedom Party was a tiny, rather insignificant political organization with affiliate members scattered throughout the district, it was much more efficient to stand out in front of a supermarket and ask people if they would like to join the party and sign a nominating petition, as any registered voter had the right to sign up people. In this way, we managed to get the signatures we needed. On occasion, we later discovered that an innocent and friendly non-citizen, who didn’t quite understand the election regulations, signed the registration form. When we realized this, we canceled the signature and tore up the registration card. I doubt if any of the people we accidentally registered ever voted. If so, it would have only a handful, as specialists have found in their research.
So, then, what is Trump up to? It’s too easy to conclude that he is losing simply his mental faculties. But it is more nefarious than that. Trump is extremely fearful that he will lose the November elections, and that the House of Representatives, and perhaps the Senate, will hold the congressional power to begin serious investigations into how he managed to engage in 2.2 billion dollars in questionable financial transactions in the first year of his new mandate. He is afraid that Congress will force the release of more Epstein documents. He is panicked that his corrupt deals with his Middle Eastern allies will be exposed.
So, he is preparing his base of support, including the 1,500 people who invaded the Capitol and whom he subsequently pardoned, as well as the white nationalist militia groups that loyally back him, to be his shock troops to support any authoritarian measures that he might attempt to carry out to maintain control of Congress. Trump hates a loser, and he will do anything within his power to avoid being one himself.
PayPal 
