President Donald Trump speaks in the East Room of the White House, July 16, 2026, in Washington. (Saul Loeb/Pool via AP)
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Donald Trump promised “really big news” in his primetime address on election integrity on Thursday night but failed to deliver any.
Instead, he recited a laundry list of disinformation and misinformation but provided no evidence votes were changed or voting systems manipulated in the election he lost six years ago.
Election experts called it “shockingly thin,” “underwhelming,” and “something less than a nothingburger.”
But that doesn’t mean the threat that Trump poses to fair elections has gone away. In fact, the speech makes it more likely that the president will ultimately take drastic action to interfere in the 2026 midterms.
Notably, the declassification of intelligence alleging that China interfered in the 2020 election, despite the fact that a 2021 review by the US National Intelligence Council found that “China did not deploy interference efforts,” is the first step in an outlandish plot by far-right election deniers to get Trump to declare a national emergency so that he can attempt to seize control of the voting system.
“Tonight’s speech is intended to add the predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections,” former White House attorney Ty Cobb told PBS prior to the speech.
Trump stopped short of doing that, for now. But he’s clearly laying the groundwork to claim those unprecedented emergency powers at some later date, possibly closer to the election, as Cobb suggests.
For the past year-and-a-half, anti-voting activists have lobbied the president to sign a 17-page executive order that would completely upend how Americans vote and have their ballots counted in an outlandish attempt to usurp powers that the Constitution explicitly gives to states and Congress. They’ve been relentlessly pushing false or inflated claims that China interfered in the 2020 election, which Trump fully embraced on Thursday, to justify the so-called national emergency.
Trump’s “speech is intended to add the predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections,” said former White House lawyer Ty Cobb.
As I reported in March, the draft order dubiously alleges that an emergency declaration would allow Trump to unilaterally outlaw mail-in voting for most Americans and seize voting machines in favor of a hand count of all ballots, which would take much longer and be far more error-prone than a regular machine count.
Additionally, the order would also require all Americans to re-register to vote in person before the 2026 midterms, effectively voiding all state voter rolls, and force voters to re-verify their status before every election, a wildly impractical measure. It would mandate that all absentee ballots be notarized and restrict mail-in voting to those who have a medical condition or are out-of-town during the election. It would require strict forms of voter ID and proof of citizenship to cast a ballot, similar to the Trump-backed Save America Act, which could disenfranchise tens of millions of Americans who lack such documents. “Taken together, the proposal amounts to a radical attempt to reshape the rules of elections ahead of the 2026 midterms,” said the voting rights group Fair Fight.
The election deniers behind this push include Peter Ticktin, a Florida-based lawyer who was a former classmate of Trump’s at the New York Military Academy and represented Tina Peters, the former Colorado election clerk who was handed a nine-year sentence for giving election conspiracists access to sensitive voting equipment (she was granted clemency in May by Colorado Gov. Jared Polis).
Ticktin has had a checkered career as a lawyer. He’s been suspended twice from the Florida bar. After the 2020 election, he represented Trump in a sprawling racketeering lawsuit accusing Hillary Clinton and Democrats of manufacturing allegations of collusion between Russia and the Trump campaign. A federal judge dismissed the lawsuit and ordered sanctions against Trump’s lawyers, including Ticktin.
The right-wing conspiracy theorist Jerome Corsi has also “been very involved” in the effort to convince Trump to sign the emergency declaration, according to Ticktin. Corsi was the driving force behind the Swift Boat Veterans for Truth smear campaign against John Kerry’s military record in 2004 and the birtherism conspiracy against Barack Obama, which Trump amplified. Corsi was investigated by special counsel Robert Mueller for allegedly acting as a conduit between Trump adviser Roger Stone and WikiLeaks as part of the effort to leak emails from Hillary Clinton’s 2016 campaign. Corsi falsely claimed the emails were leaked by murdered DNC staffer Seth Rich.
The once-fringe push for an emergency executive order has been amplified by influential advisers to the president. Cleta Mitchell, the former Trump lawyer who helped the president attempt to overturn the 2020 election, said on a podcast in September 2025 that she believed “the president is thinking that he will exercise some emergency powers to protect the federal elections going forward.” Mitchell convened two dozen election deniers at the White House on Monday, just days before Trump’s speech. Steve Bannon has repeatedly promoted the national emergency scenario on his radio show. And six high-ranking administration aides took part in a gathering hosted by Michael Flynn last winter where attendees called on Trump to declare a national emergency.
Of course, many of these same people were pushing Trump to do just that in 2020. In December 2020, Flynn, former Trump lawyer Sidney Powell, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne went to the White House to urge Trump to order the military to seize state voting machines. Trump was talked off the ledge by his advisers, but he has now wholeheartedly embraced the most hair-brained schemes concocted by election deniers in his inner circle. Indeed, Bill Pulte, the Trump-hatchet man turned acting Director of National Intelligence, and John Solomon, the right-wing journalist renowned for spreading misinformation have played a leading role in pushing to selectively declassify the intelligence documents that Trump prominently cited in his speech.
The entire basis for the emergency declaration is built on lies. A review by the US National Intelligence Council found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 elections.” They specifically concluded that “China did not deploy interference efforts and considered but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the US presidential election.”
Even Solomon admitted on Thursday night he hasn’t uncovered any evidence of foreign governments altering votes in US elections. “I only know the intelligence community has zero evidence that a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, 2022 or 2024,” he told MS NOW’s Vaughn Hillyard.
The two statutes that Ticktin claims allow Trump to declare a national emergency—the National Emergencies Act (NEA) and the International Emergency Economic Powers Act (IEEPA)—in fact give the president no control over the voting process. (The Supreme Court ruled in February that the president could not invoke the IEEPA to justify his tariffs.)
“None of the cited authorities delegates the president any power to change voting laws, let alone the wholesale takeover of federal and local elections that the draft EO attempts to enact, even in the face of national emergency—including attempted foreign interference,” found an analysis from the Center for American Progress.
Trump would love nothing more than to assume dictatorial powers over the election system that the Constitution prohibits the president from having. He has called on Republicans to “take over the voting in at least 15 places” and has already attempted to interfere in the midterms in a multitude of different ways.
Those efforts include:
- Relentlessly pushing Congress to pass the Save America Act, the GOP’s sweeping voter suppression bill.
- The Department of Homeland Security threatening to cut off anti-terrorism funding to states that don’t comply with Trump’s voting-mandates and the Postal Service considering only sending mail ballots to voters in states that hand over their voter rolls to the administration.
The problem for Trump is that many of these efforts have been unsuccessful. Both of his voting-related executive orders have been blocked in court, since the Constitution is very clear that states, with oversight from Congress, run their elections. The Justice Department is 0-15 in court cases seeking to obtain state voter rolls. The Save America Act has little chance of passing.
As Trump becomes more unpopular, his administration is growing more desperate. That’s why the president is escalating his lies about the 2020 election and is being lobbied by election deniers to take more drastic actions in response to them. Thursday’s unhinged speech was the perfect illustration of that.
