Primetime Address Identifies Huge Threat to Fair Elections: Donald J. Trump

More than anything, Donald Trump’s much ballyhooed speech on elections demonstrated that the president himself remains the biggest threat to democracy in US history.

As predicted, Thursday night’s address amounted to little more than Trump’s latest attempt to blame his decisive 2020 election loss to Joe Biden on anything other than the simple fact that 7 million more Americans voted for the Democrat.

And, once again, he failed spectacularly.

Before we get into that, we would like to reiterate how tired we are of this. Just because Trump can’t accept that he lost, the president is dragging down democracy. Everybody with even a cursory understanding of the facts (which, shockingly, excludes a large number of Republicans in Congress) knows that his claims are bogus. And yet, they are going along with this charade so as not to upset the thin-skinned president (to be fair, many of them are also doing it because they realize that it is much easier to win elections by suppressing voters than passing policies voters like).

In the process, they are doing incalculable and long-lasting damage to the country. That is the threat and, unlike Trump’s nonsensical claims, it is very real.

So let’s look at what the president “revealed” in his speech.

First of all, he talked a lot about China and how it “compromised” election data through an “illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files.”

However, while the process varies by state, in many cases these voter lists can be purchased or even downloaded for free.

In other words, there is nothing “illicit” about it.

The president also asserted that China attempted to influence the outcome of the 2020 election by making him look bad (which, ironically, is what Russia actually did to Hillary Clinton in 2016 to help him win). First of all, he tries to interfere in the elections of other countries all the time. In addition, Trump was unpopular throughout his first term, so it didn’t take China to make him appear in an unfavorable light.

Furthermore, the intelligence community concluded that Beijing ultimately decided not to get involved in the race because it sought a more stable relationship with the US.

The experts also agreed that China did not try to interfere with election processes. This point was reiterated by right-wing influencer and special White House adviser John Solomon, who acknowledged Thursday night that no votes were changed in the last three elections.

In other words, all of that China stuff is just smoke and mirrors and doesn’t amount to anything that could even remotely suggest that the election was “stolen.”

Most importantly, here is what Beijing didn’t do: It didn’t engage in a mid-decade gerrymandering campaign to give one party a better chance of winning the midterms. It didn’t issue unconstitutional executive orders giving the president more power over elections. It didn’t effectively dismantle the federal agency that helps states ensure that their elections run more smoothly. It isn’t trying to end mail-in voting. It isn’t undermining Americans’ confidence in elections at every turn. It didn’t try to overturn the result of an election. It hasn’t slashed the workforce of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, i.e., the people whose job it is to protect election infrastructure. And it definitely didn’t send a mob to the Capitol to prevent the certification of a presidential election.

That was all Trump, the real danger to democracy.

But the speech wasn’t just about China.

The president also blasted the intelligence community and accused the “deep state” of working to “to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China’s sinister election meddling” (which, again, doesn’t appear to have been sinister at all).

Finally, he said that the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) had identified 278,000 noncitizens who registered to vote in four states.

There is a lot to debunk here. For example, it is important to note that the federal tool used to verify the citizenship status of voters keeps flagging false positives because it designates naturalized citizens as noncitizens.

However, the fact that we have to do this over and over shows that many Americans are immune to the truth, facts, and reality. That’s why we want to try something different:

We can all agree that Trump isn’t exactly a “let bygones be bygones” type of person. In fact, he is petty and vindictive.

So, if you are one of the people who believe his lies, riddle us this: If China tried to torpedo his presidency and stole the 2020 election, why isn’t it being punished? Why hasn’t its ambassador been summoned or expelled? Why isn’t Trump punishing Beijing with tariffs? Why does he keep saying good things about the country and its leader?

If the intelligence community made him look like a fool by withholding information, where are the indictments?

And if DHS has the names of hundreds of thousands of noncitizens who cast ballots, why aren’t they being charged with voting illegally, which is a felony?

The reason is that none of these things is happening, or they are not as bad as Trump is trying to make them sound.

In the end, apart from soothing the president’s fragile ego, the point of this exercise was to put more pressure on senators to pass the “SAVE America Act,” a new voter suppression law that Republicans hope will win them the midterms.

It’s about disenfranchising millions of voters who are more likely to support Democrats than the GOP.

And that’s precisely why, when it comes to threats to American democracy and free and fair elections, Trump is in a league of his own.