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 address to drag the country back through his long-running claims about the 2020 election and alleged foreign interference. The White House says nobody knows yet what he’ll ultimately say. That’s the point. The apparatus gets the spotlight, and everybody else gets to wait for the next round of manufactured confusion.
Trump has already said the speech will “concern that subject” and “we’ll have a couple of other things to say also.” He told a reporter on Tuesday, “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.” He added, “it doesn’t get bigger because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.” Those are his words, delivered from the top of the hierarchy, where a president can turn a national broadcast into a personal stage for old grievances and new pressure.
Who Gets to Rewrite Reality
Trump’s expected address comes after he lost to Democrat Joe Biden in 2020 and after years of false claims and conspiracy theories about that election. In the weeks after Trump lost, the people he 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. That didn’t stop him. In his second term, Trump has tried to use the levers of power to rewrite that history. He 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.
Many of Trump’s nominees have refused to directly answer who won in 2020, instead saying Biden became president. Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee to become the next national intelligence director, used that formula in his confirmation hearing on Wednesday. “He had the most electoral votes,” Clayton said of Biden. “He was declared the winner.” 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 replied, “That’s your characterization. I’m not going to continue to do this.”
That exchange says plenty. The people being asked to serve the machine won’t even say what happened in plain language, because the machine rewards caution, obedience and strategic fog.
The Cost Lands Below
Election experts fear another round of falsehoods. Victoria Bassetti of States United, a nonpartisan group supporting 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. I suppose the president could come up with some new assertion or new conclusion. It would fly in the face of all the evidence.”
Trump has already teased “really big news” and said, “it doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.” He has also embraced conspiracy theories about an international cabal that penetrated U.S. voting machines, theories that have led to libel suits against his allies when they repeated the claims. One version alleges that Venezuela and possibly other countries manipulated U.S. voting machines to deprive Trump of a victory.
There has been an enormous amount of review of the 2020 election. Trump and his allies lost dozens of court cases challenging the results, sometimes before judges Trump appointed himself. Numerous audits, recounts and investigations, including several by Republicans, found no major problems with the vote or count. Trump’s 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.”
What the State Is Doing Now
Since returning to office, Trump has launched a review of the 2020 vote. 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. 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, and the FBI reassigned hundreds of analysts to go through the material. Still, 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 airing those claims and others 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, whom 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 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. 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.”
Primetime presidential addresses are typically reserved for major milestones or nationally significant events. Trump last did it in April to speak on the Iran war, a month after it started. He said then that the U.S. would accomplish its objectives “very shortly” and that “the hard part is done, so it should be easy.” The war has dragged on and strikes between the U.S. and Iran have intensified this week. Trump also delivered a politically charged primetime speech in December in which he sought to blame the challenging economic climate on Democrats.
It was not clear if TV networks were planning to air the speech, or to what extent. Messages to ABC, CBS, NBC, CNN, Fox News and MS NOW asking about coverage plans were not immediately returned.
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. “‘The unfounded claims,’” Vance said, repeating the reporter’s language. “You’re basically assuming an answer in the very question that you ask.” He added, “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. “But,” he said, “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.” Associated Press writers Mary Clare Jalonick and Will Weissert in Washington and Jocelyn Noveck in New York contributed to this report.