Trump’s November plan fails

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Last night, President Trump gave a rare prime-time speech, but his speech fell well short of the hype. Ostensibly, the president was going to make a major statement about the integrity of the election, but in reality the speech was dense and raucous. As my colleagues report, he has provided no evidence to support his long-running lie that the 2020 election was stolen. The White House also released four tranches of documents intended to support the speech, but Trump’s claims were a mix of recycled information, false claims of evidence and tendentious assertions based on documents too redacted to analyze. Major news networks, apparently worried that Trump might be misleading, refused to broadcast the speech live.

So why deliver it? This speech was a sign of desperation. Trump spoke now not only to distract from his war in Iran and its effects on the economy, but also because his attempts to actually interfere with the 2026 election have so far almost entirely failed. As the opportunity to change the rules of the game before November eludes him, the president falls back on one of the few tools he has left: trying to sow chaos and doubt among Americans.

Trump had remarkable success in his gerrymandering campaign before the midterm elections. Several Republican states have redrawn their districts to add Republican-leaning seats, with the Supreme Court’s April decision in Louisiana v. Callais allowed other states to move forward with their own maps, and a Virginia state court rejected retaliatory gerrymandering that would have helped Democrats. In total, this gave Republicans several more likely seats.

But almost everything else has failed, including the president’s signature legislative initiative to overhaul elections by requiring, in part, that voters provide proof of citizenship. Last week, Trump refused to sign a bipartisan housing bill “in PROTEST that the U.S. Senate is unable to pass THE SAVE AMERICA ACT.” It’s a peculiar and ineffective move — the housing bill became law anyway — but he’s right about the prospects of the SAVE America Act. Yesterday, Sen. Thom Tillis, a retired Republican from North Carolina, vowed to block the bill if it comes back. As Tillis pointed out, it would be too late to implement this plan by midterm anyway.

However, most of the subversion methods Trump has tried have been executive actions that do not require Congress. But the president has no control over elections: that power is delegated to the states or Congress. As a result, most of Trump’s major initiatives have either been blocked by the courts or simply ignored by state and local officials.

Federal judges blocked parts of an executive order that purported to direct states not to accept mail-in ballots after Election Day and to require proof of citizenship. The justices also ruled against an order that would have established a federal database of voting-age citizens and then attempted to force states to use the list to screen votes by blocking the U.S. Postal Service from delivering ballots to anyone not on it. The process was an obscure, if not impractical, attempt to solve a problem – widespread non-citizen voting – that simply does not exist.

Although some states have voluntarily turned over voter rolls to the federal government, many others have challenged these requests in court and won. The Justice Department’s pressure tactics are now provoking angry reactions, even from Republican allies. In Idaho, the state government, which referred alleged cases of noncitizen voting to the federal government, was threatened with litigation if noncitizens were allowed to vote; GOP leaders were furious over recent communications from the Justice Department.

Earlier this month, Trump fired two members of the Election Assistance Commission and a third resigned, leaving the body without any leadership. Exactly what Trump wants here is a bit opaque. The EAC is essentially advisory, and crippling it will make life more difficult for local officials, but it also feels like an admission of defeat: Trump had attempted to use the EAC to decertify all existing voting machines and enforce his proof of citizenship ruling. He now appears to be giving it up — although the EAC would be a useful way to help local officials address some of the security weaknesses Trump discussed in his speech, such as the computer systems used to manage voting processes (although, importantly, no evidence suggests that actual ballots or vote totals are vulnerable).

Trump continues to search for evidence of fraud in the 2020 election, but his search remains fruitless and he didn’t even make a case for it last night. The president has focused particularly on Georgia, but a federal judge appointed by Trump this month blocked the Justice Department from subpoenaing people who worked in Fulton County during that election, and two FBI agents tasked with reviewing old evidence were fired for refusing to do so, MS NOW reported.

What options does this leave for Trump? We are trying to create chaos by insisting on the existence of fraud. That was apparently the point of last night’s speech. Having failed in any legislative or policy effort, Trump’s chief accomplices in his latest campaign are Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligence, an extremist partisan who has no statutory role in elections and who also has no experience in election administration or security; and John Solomon, a right-wing pundit with a long history of spreading false claims, who was hired by the White House to construct narratives like those presented by Trump. The second, as I wrote in a detailed article in October about how Trump was already trying to overturn the midterm elections, is to deploy federal troops or law enforcement at election time.

The danger posed by either of these options should not be dismissed, but there are reasons why they were not Trump’s first choices: They are risky and less likely to succeed. Because election officials, experts and nonprofits have been alert to the threat for months, they are now much better prepared for anything the administration might attempt, as Washington Monthly’s Garrett Epps recently reported.

The best defense against subversion, as I wrote last fall, is for Americans to vote. It’s easier to steal a close election than a decisive one, and Trump’s policy failures have produced polls that point in the direction of a strong vote against the Republican Party this fall. (As Rep. Thomas Massie, a Republican gadfly, noted this week, shouting about voter fraud is an odd choice when your party controls the White House, House and Senate.) Prime-time speeches that spew grievances and obvious lies can further alienate voters from the Republican Party. Ironically, last night’s speech could actually help protect the integrity of the 2026 election.

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