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| Old news from an old man. |
American television may preempt summer programming or not carry it all. Especially if the president doesn't offer anything meaningful or live sports is active.
The president threatened to sicc the FCC on networks that refuse to carry it.
An 80 year old curmudgeon rambling about how he was denied an election victory.
The fool blames China for the election loss. Let's ignore the fact he failed to handle one of the biggest threats in our country. The coronavirus pandemic was done so poorly by the president, it was one of the biggest reasons to why he lost.
Also the failure to sympathize with Americans who want police reform in the wake of the George Floyd murder.
President Donald J. Trump is addressing the nation on Thursday. He will likely give updates on the war in Iran. He will pivot to how great the U.S. is and some random story about how his frenemy Lindsey Graham changed America.
He might discuss the elections and demands of Congress to pass another of his signature proposals. The SAVE Act is stalled because of the filibuster and Republicans are slowly developing a plan to end cloture and pass it through simple majority.
Democrats had an opportunity but Kyrsten Sinema, Joe Manchin and John Fetterman blocked it.
Trump went into minutes of random disinformation and gaslighting.
About 25 minutes of his rant he claims that China interfered in the 2020 election. The president announced he declassified intelligence he claims China hacked into American voting machines.
The 25-minute address underscored Trump’s effort to make election security a central political issue ahead of November’s midterm elections, when Republicans will be defending their congressional majorities and face the possibility of losing control of one or both chambers.
Trump has pressed his fellow Republicans in Congress to pass legislation imposing new voter identification and citizenship requirements, despite longstanding findings that voter fraud in U.S. elections is rare.
The president said he was declassifying sensitive information that showed China had illicitly acquired 220 million U.S. voter files, including names, addresses and other data used to register to vote.
He asserted that members of the U.S. intelligence community deliberately suppressed information about the extent of China’s activities.
His allegations contradict an unclassified 2021 U.S. intelligence community assessment that found no indications any foreign actor attempted to alter or succeeded in altering “any technical aspect” of the 2020 presidential election vote, including voter registrations, ballots, tabulations or results.
The assessment was conducted under John Ratcliffe, then Trump’s director of national intelligence and now his CIA director.
Ahead of Trump’s speech, some White House officials expressed concern that disclosing the China information could be misleading, sources told Reuters.
Trump’s harsh language about China risked rocking a relationship that has steadied following last year’s costly trade war. Trump hopes to meet with Chinese President Xi Jinping in September about improving trade relations.
Before Trump began speaking, a spokesperson for the Chinese embassy, Liu Chang, said in response to a request for comment, “China has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the U.S.”
Trump has spent years raising doubts about electoral outcomes, falsely asserting that his 2020 loss to Democrat Joe Biden was rigged. He has also advanced other false claims, including that mail-in balloting is rife with fraud, voting machines are vulnerable and non-citizen voting is widespread.
Numerous courts and vote recounts found no evidence of large-scale fraud in the 2020 election.
Trump also said he was declassifying data that would reveal “shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure.”
But many of the documents appeared to show the opposite, or were not related to U.S. election infrastructure at all. One CIA document, prepared last month, concerned Venezuela’s election, not America’s.
“We assess that vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results,” another document said.
A third document - produced by the CIA - detailed efforts by Chinese spies to target Biden’s campaign and noted that Beijing “does not currently intend to covertly interfere to try to sway the outcome of the election,” although it said China might later decide to do so.
“Trump’s shocking ‘bombshells’ about China are totally bogus,” Democratic Senator Mark Warner, vice chair of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said in a statement. “The fact is our intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that China did not even try to change a single vote in the 2020 election.”
Familiar Claims
Earlier on Thursday, Democratic members of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence sent a letter to the acting director of national intelligence, Bill Pulte, along with the leaders of the FBI, the Central Intelligence Agency and the National Security Agency, warning them not to allow Trump to “weaponize intelligence to support false claims about election security.”
Two of the three major U.S. television networks and CNN decided not to broadcast the prime-time address on their primary platforms, departing from a practice typically reserved for major addresses on issues of national import.
Since returning to office in January 2025, Trump has sought to expand federal power over the administration of elections, which legally resides with state governments under the U.S. Constitution.
In recent months, he has also pressured Senate Republicans to advance a bill, the SAVE America Act, that would require photo ID to vote and proof of U.S. citizenship to register while also mandating that states share voter registration information with the federal government. Democrats and voting-rights advocates say that voter fraud is exceedingly rare and argue the legislation would suppress legitimate votes.
