President Donald Trump is set to address the nation on Thursday night at 9 p.m. on elections and voting machines, using a primetime presidential slot to revisit claims about the 2020 vote that his own appointees and multiple reviews already rejected. The White House says nobody knows yet what he’ll ultimately say. That uncertainty is the point. The apparatus gets to keep everyone waiting while it prepares another round of manufactured doubt.
Who Gets Dragged Into the Machine
Trump told a reporter on Tuesday that the speech would “concern that subject” when asked about “election machines and integrity,” and said, “we’ll have a couple of other things to say also.” He added, “I have really, really big news and our country has to shape up. But that’s what we’re going to be talking about Thursday.” Then came the familiar line: “it doesn’t get bigger because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.”
That language lands after years of the same fight over the same lie. In the weeks after Donald Trump lost to Joe Biden in 2020, the people Trump appointed to run the Department of Justice, cybersecurity agencies and intelligence departments all said the election was fair, legitimate and free of major fraud or foreign interference. Now, in his second term, Trump has tried to use the levers of power to rewrite that history. He’s expected to try again on Thursday night.
The pressure doesn’t stop at rhetoric. Trump has already appointed loyalists who have echoed his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen and made clear he expects everyone to follow his lead. Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to become the next national intelligence director, repeated the formula at his confirmation hearing on Wednesday. Clayton said, “He had the most electoral votes. He was declared the winner.” When Sen. Mark Kelly, an Arizona Democrat, asked, “And who has the most electoral votes? Is it the person who wins or the person who loses?” Clayton answered, “That’s your characterization. I’m not going to continue to do this.”
What the Reviews Already Found
The record is already thick with refusals to back Trump’s story. Numerous audits, recounts and investigations, including several by Republicans, found no major problems with the vote or count. Trump’s own attorney general at the time, William Barr, said there were no signs of significant fraud. Trump’s appointee to run the agency that watches for cyberattacks on American election infrastructure, Chris Krebs, declared that the 2020 election was secure and there were no signs of tampering. Trump fired Krebs and later demanded an investigation of him upon returning to power in 2025.
An intelligence assessment released in the early days of the Biden administration but completed on Jan. 7, 2021, in Trump’s last days in office, found no foreign tampering with vote totals or election equipment in 2020. Last year, Trump signed a federal document as part of a regular review of possible foreign influence in elections that declared “there has been no evidence of a foreign power altering the outcome or vote tabulation in any United States election.”
Still, Trump has launched a review of the 2020 vote since returning to office. Federal agents have seized voting records in Democratic-run Fulton County, Georgia, and Republican-run Maricopa County, Arizona, two major metropolitan swing state counties that figured prominently in 2020 conspiracy theories. Trump tapped Kurt Olsen, a prominent lawyer in the world of election conspiracy theorists, to head the probe. Olsen was previously sanctioned by the Arizona Supreme Court for false statements in a lawsuit he brought to challenge the 2022 loss of an Arizona governor’s race by one of Trump’s allies.
David Becker, a former Department of Justice lawyer who now leads the Center for Election Integrity & Research, said, “He has committed untold taxpayer resources.” Becker added, “They’ve found nothing.” A search warrant affidavit filed in the Fulton County case was full of old, debunked conspiracy theories about the vote in the county. The FBI reassigned hundreds of analysts to go through the material.
Who Pays for the Theater
Election experts fear another round of falsehoods. Victoria Bassetti of States United, a nonpartisan group supporting the state officials who run elections, said, “There has been six-plus years of consistent findings from the intelligence community and from everyone who’s looked at it that there was no foreign interference in 2020, and our voting systems were secure and accurate.” She added, “I suppose the president could come up with some new assertion or new conclusion. It would fly in the face of all the evidence.”
The costs keep landing on ordinary people, county offices, and public institutions forced to absorb the fallout. Trump and his allies lost dozens of court cases challenging the results, sometimes before judges the president appointed himself. Yet the claims keep getting recycled, and the machinery of state keeps grinding forward to service them.
Election conspiracy theorists have been buzzing since Election Day in 2020 that Trump is about to reveal irrefutable evidence of massive election fraud. One version alleges that Venezuela and possibly other countries manipulated U.S. voting machines to deprive Trump of a victory. Those theories have led to massive payouts in libel lawsuits brought by voting machine companies and others. Fox News paid $787.5 million to settle one lawsuit over it airing those claims and others on the air in late 2020. Conservative networks Newsmax and One America News have also reached settlements with voting companies over airing those allegations. A Denver jury found that Mike Lindell, a prominent election conspiracy theorist who Trump this week endorsed as a Republican candidate for governor in Minnesota, defamed an employee with a voting machine company by calling him a traitor.
Becker said there has been a clear pattern over the six years of election conspiracy theories surrounding Trump’s loss. He said conspiracy theorists, including Trump himself, make sweeping allegations in public, sometimes with what seems to be massive reams of documentation from elaborate election databases, but they’ve lost regularly in court, where the threshold is whether there’s any factual basis to the claims. Becker suggested that anything new from Trump on elections be subjected to that same scrutiny. He said, “If someone’s alleging a crime that occurred six years ago, we shouldn’t be responding to their claims. We should be demanding they meet the burden of proof.”
Democrats warned that Trump was trying to revive false claims of past stolen elections in order to delegitimize the upcoming 2026 midterm elections, in which Trump’s Republican Party is facing headwinds. Virginia Democratic Sen. Mark Warner said in a statement on X, “Tomorrow night, Trump is going to use a primetime address to stoke misleading claims about our elections in order to justify interfering in our midterms. It’s on all of us to follow the facts and not accept his constant stream of misdirections and lies.” New Jersey Democratic Sen. Andy Kim said in a post on X, “Trump is again trying to drum up baseless election conspiracies ahead of the November elections. Americans are tired of endless war, skyrocketing gas prices, and a president that isn’t looking out for them. Voters will make their voices heard, whether Trump wants them to or not.”
On Capitol Hill on Wednesday, Vice President JD Vance bristled when asked if he’d encourage Trump in his Thursday remarks to stay focused on November’s midterm elections rather than relitigate past elections. Vance said, “‘The unfounded claims,’” repeating the reporter’s language. He added, “You’re basically assuming an answer in the very question that you ask.” Vance said, “The president is going to talk about a number of things tomorrow night. I’m obviously not going to get ahead of his remarks. But we can talk about a number of the American people’s problems. We can solve a number of the American people’s problems.” Senate Majority Leader John Thune, R-S.D., told reporters that he doesn’t know what Trump is going to say. He said, “But the only thing I can tell you is that we are focused on the 2026 election, at least I am, and I think most of my colleagues are.”
Trump’s address comes with the usual pageantry of power and the same old demand for obedience. The speech may be billed as a national moment. It reads like another attempt to force the public to relive a settled defeat while the people at the bottom pay for the spectacle.