{"id":1111,"date":"2026-07-17T17:40:32","date_gmt":"2026-07-17T17:40:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=1111"},"modified":"2026-07-17T17:40:32","modified_gmt":"2026-07-17T17:40:32","slug":"trumps-primetime-speech-was-a-dud-he-could-still-use-it-to-interfere-in-the-midterms","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/movingandmortgagehub.com\/?p=1111","title":{"rendered":"Trump\u2019s Primetime Speech Was a Dud. He Could Still Use it to Interfere in the Midterms."},"content":{"rendered":"
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\"President<\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Donald Trump promised<\/span> \u201creally big news\u201d in his primetime address on election integrity on Thursday night but failed to deliver any.<\/p>

Read more As America Baked, Team Trump Axed More Than 1,600 Energy Efficiency Web Pages<\/a><\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

Election experts called it \u201cshockingly thin,\u201d \u201cunderwhelming,\u201d and \u201csomething less than a nothingburger.\u201d <\/p>\n

But that doesn\u2019t 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.<\/p>\n

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 that \u201cChina did not deploy interference efforts,\u201d 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. <\/p>\n

\u201cTonight\u2019s speech is intended to add the predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections,\u201d former White House attorney Ty Cobb told PBS prior to the speech.<\/p>\n

Trump stopped short of doing that, for now. But he\u2019s clearly laying the groundwork to claim those unprecedented emergency powers at some later date, possibly closer to the election, as Cobb suggests.<\/p>\n

For the past year-and-a-half, anti-voting activists have lobbied the president to sign a 17-page\u00a0executive order\u00a0that would completely upend how Americans vote and have their ballots counted in an outlandish attempt to\u00a0usurp powers\u00a0that the Constitution explicitly gives to states and Congress. They\u2019ve 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.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0error-prone\u00a0than a regular machine count.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0tens of millions of Americans\u00a0who lack such documents. \u201cTaken together, the proposal amounts to a radical attempt to reshape the rules of elections ahead of the 2026 midterms,\u201d\u00a0said the voting rights group Fair Fight. <\/p>\n