Donald Trump addressed the country last night lying across multiple topics, including rehashing his favorite conspiracy theories and renewing attacks on trans people and immigrants.
While Trump said his much-ballyhooed speech was about “building” confidence in U.S. elections, he actually spent most of his address undermining them.
The speech was basically a big nothing burger. ABC and NBC declined to air the speech live (knowing the litany of forthcoming lies) and Trump predictably called for their licenses to be revoked.
Trump says Democrats forgot to rig the election in 2016, successfully rigged it while *he* was president in 2020, then forgot how to rig it again in 2024. So the only election Democrats supposedly stole was the one he himself controlled.
You have to be a special kind of stupid…
— Rep. Jim McGovern (@RepMcGovern) July 16, 2026
Trump calls for revocation of ABC, NBC licenses over speech snub https://t.co/OEyRNkN04a
— POLITICO (@politico) July 17, 2026
From the New York Times:
“Great damage has been done to our country,” the president said. “Our elections were left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen, and the trust of the American people was lost. This cannot be allowed to continue.”
But documents Mr. Trump released to support his claims — and previous assessments from the intelligence community — do not back up his most aggressive statements about election security. In fact, some of the documents reach the opposite conclusion.
They also do not contain significant new revelations about vulnerabilities in election systems.
One of the documents posted on the White House website was blunt: “We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results.”
Trump on the state of the country two years ago: “We had transgender for everybody” pic.twitter.com/mvb8lDmQqW
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar) July 17, 2026
And via the Washington Post:
In a prime-time presidential address that the White House and Republican allies said would present bombshell findings from an exhaustive reexamination of law enforcement and intelligence files, Trump never claimed to have any evidence of altered votes or compromised machines.
Instead he described “vulnerabilities” in election infrastructure, without alleging that the weaknesses were exploited. He accused China of an “illicit” acquisition of U.S. voter files including names, addresses, phone number and party affiliation — all of which is publicly available information.
There is no evidence or intelligence that the Chinese government hacked or compromised state voter registration systems in 2020, two former senior U.S. officials said.
One of the documents released by the White House said Russia tried to undermine Biden – not Trump – in the 2020 election. #fail
The declassified documents Trump just released tonight to “prove” the 2020 election was “rigged” actually show that Russia tried to interfere to hurt Biden and help Trump. pic.twitter.com/UlCmXhxRFY
— Headquarters (@HQNewsNow) July 17, 2026
John Solomon, the conspiracy theorist “reporter” Trump hired to investigate the 2020 election, admitted no votes were changed.
When asked if there’s any intelligence showing Trump actually won, he answered, “Not yet,” before quickly fleeing the scene
Lol pic.twitter.com/5z51MKqQEo
— Republicans against Trump (@RpsAgainstTrump) July 17, 2026
HOLY CRAP!
The documents Trump just released following his speech show that Russians worked with American officials to advance stories about Burisma and Joe Biden being corrupt.
Someone is going to get fired tonight for accidentally allowing this one to be declassified. pic.twitter.com/pPdxhtaPm7
— Brian Krassenstein (@krassenstein) July 17, 2026
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