President Donald Trump will deliver a primetime address at 9 p.m. Thursday as he escalates calls for Republicans to pass tighter federal voting rules for November’s midterm elections. The speech lands while he’s also dealing with a collapsing deal to end the war with Iran and recent deadly shootings by Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers. The machinery of power keeps grinding, and ordinary people are expected to absorb the fallout.
Asked Tuesday for a preview, Trump offered little detail but said he has “really big news.” “It doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country,” Trump said in the Oval Office. He refused to go further, saying he wanted to “save it” for the moment, though he also said, “We’ll be discussing other things, too,” and, “It’s going to be a very big announcement.”
Who Gets to Define ‘Election Security’
Trump has used the primetime presidential address before, including one in December when he sought to blame the challenging economic climate on Democrats. Thursday’s address appears set to go further, using the moment to amplify election lies before an audience of millions in an effort to boost Republican prospects before midterms that could hobble Trump for the rest of his term. The message is plain enough. Control the rules, control the field.
On Monday, when asked about the speech, Trump repeated baseless claims of voter fraud in the Los Angeles primary race for mayor. During an interview with conservative outlet Newsmax, Trump said Republican Spencer Pratt lost his primary bid because of fraud, citing in part California’s slow vote count. Federal prosecutors said they were opening fraud investigations in the state last month after Trump drew attention to the claim. The state’s institutions move fast when power wants a target.
Trump’s preoccupation with voting fraud and election security dates back at least to 2016, when he refused to say whether he would accept defeat to Democrat Hillary Clinton. After he won, he convened a voting integrity commission to support his claims that widespread voter fraud cost him the popular vote, though the commission disbanded without uncovering any such evidence. The commission didn’t find proof. It still served its purpose.
The Bottom Rung Pays for the Panic
Four years later, after he lost the 2020 election to Joe Biden, Trump again claimed cheating and focused on Biden’s narrow win in Georgia. Trump called the state’s secretary of state and pressured him to “find 11,780 votes,” just enough to overturn Biden’s victory in the state. Trump, along with more than a dozen allies, was indicted in the state, though the charges were later dropped. The pressure campaign came from the top. The demand was simple: manufacture the numbers.
Repeated audits and reviews — many run by Republicans, including Trump’s own then-attorney general — have found no significant fraud occurred in 2020. Before winning in 2024, Trump was again laying the groundwork to claim cheating if he lost. After returning to office, he stocked his administration with officials who back his false claims of 2020 election fraud. The apparatus didn’t correct itself. It adapted.
Trump has made voting regulation a core issue during his second term, frequently declaring that he won the White House “three times” and demanding legislation that would require voter ID and sharply limit mail-in voting. Facing midterm races that will decide control of Capitol Hill, Trump has stirred new claims to cast doubt on election results that could challenge his power in Washington. The people at the bottom get more rules. The people at the top get more leverage.
What They’re Calling Order
Earlier this year, FBI agents raided elections offices in Fulton County, Georgia, seizing materials from the 2020 election. Tulsi Gabbard, then Trump’s director of national intelligence, traveled to Atlanta to oversee the execution of the search warrant. That’s the state’s answer when the ruling class decides suspicion is enough.
Maryland Gov. Wes Moore, campaigning in Georgia for Democratic Sen. Jon Ossoff and governor’s candidate Keisha Lance Bottoms, said Tuesday that Trump’s approach was “for losers.” “I think people are exhausted by having conversations about elections that happened six years ago, that we have the answer to,” Moore said. “He continues to bring this up because he cannot get out of his mind that he actually could have lost.” Even inside the electoral cage, the exhaustion is obvious.
Beyond Georgia, Trump has widely taken aim at states that allow voters to submit ballots by mail. Trump said he called a U.S. attorney in California and demanded scrutiny of the governor’s primary last month as votes were being counted. Last week, Trump ousted the remaining members of the federal Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan panel that resisted his efforts to require would-be voters to document their U.S. citizenship before registering. The panel was bipartisan. The purge was not. The message was control, plain and ugly.