The speech marks the president’s latest push to deny his 2020 election loss and rally support for stricter voter ID and citizenship rules.
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The White House promised major revelations in President Donald Trump’s prime-time address on election security Thursday while Democrats warned against false and misleading allegations and some Republicans hoped to focus on voters’ bigger priorities.
“That election was a closed issue back in 2020,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune (R-South Dakota) said Wednesday. “I’m not looking back into the past. I’m looking to the future.”
The speech marked the president’s latest push to deny his 2020 election loss and rally support for stricter voter ID and citizenship rules. For months, multiple federal agencies have been reexamining law enforcement files and voting records pursuing claims of fraud that were previously investigated and rejected.
People briefed on the speech said it included allegations of Chinese influence efforts. Officials in 2020 uniformly said there was no evidence of altered votes or compromised systems even as they disagreed on China’s intentions and activities.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt rejected criticism that the president should be focused on voters’ priorities, such as the economy. She added that advisers discussed addressing other subjects such as the Iran war and the economy.
“He sometimes is thinking about these things up until he walks out,” she said. “The administration, and especially this president, are able to walk and chew gum at the same time and tackle a number of issues on a number of different subjects every single day.”
NBC, ABC and CNN said they would stream the speech and cover it on their news broadcast but would not interrupt their regular prime-time programming. CBS and Fox had not announced coverage decisions ahead of the speech.
The White House requested airtime, two people familiar with the matter said, and Leavitt had urged networks to carry the speech, calling election security “very near and dear to the hearts of many Americans across the country.” She said Americans would be “relieved” to hear the president’s message.
Democrats warned that Trump’s focus on 2020 was actually preparation to undermine or challenge the 2026 election results.
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“The world’s most famous sore loser will deliver a prime-time presidential sour-grapes address to pursue his six-year-old grievances about the 2020 election while his war in the Middle East spirals out of control and the cost of living continues to rise for Americans across the country,” Sen. Jon Ossoff (D-Georgia) told reporters ahead of the speech on Thursday.
“He’s laying the groundwork for a potential challenge to the result — another bad-faith challenge.”
Democrats also said Trump’s preoccupation with his loss six years ago would cost him with voters, who increasingly disapprove of his handling of the Iran war and the economy.
“His whole scheme is just going to backfire on him,” Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer (D-New York) said. “He’ll be worse off tomorrow after he gives this speech than tonight.”
The White House briefed right-wing allies and media figures on the findings on Monday, fueling online hype that included speculation Trump would go so far as to declare Georgia’s Democratic senators illegitimate or release new evidence of Chinese meddling.
Officials have known for years that China accessed voter files, but those are publicly available records, said Rachel Cohen, a spokeswoman for Senate Intelligence Committee vice chair Mark Warner (D-Virginia). Intelligence agencies publicly disclosed in 2021 that China considered — but did not go through with — trying to influence the outcome of the 2020 election. Some officials believed China may have taken some steps to undermine Trump, according to the spy agencies’ March 2021 report, but they still agreed with the conclusion that no votes were changed.
That view was shared by John Ratcliffe, who served as Trump’s director of national intelligence in 2020 and now leads the CIA. He and other senior Trump administration officials suggested before the election that China was a larger threat than Russia. They took issue with the intelligence community’s assessment before the November 2020 election that Moscow had a preference for Trump, according to former U.S. officials.
”I know my conclusions are right, based on the intelligence that I see,“ Ratcliffe said, according to a January 2021 report to Congress by an analytic ombudsman for intelligence agencies. ”Many analysts think I am going off the script. They don’t realize that I did it based on the intelligence.”
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Theodoric Meyer and Scott Nover contributed to this report.
