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Democrats and voting rights groups say Donald Trump’s primetime speech making unverified claims of Chinese interference in the 2020 election is the clearest sign yet that the president is laying the groundwork to tamper with the results of November’s midterms.
The upcoming elections to decide the balance of power in Congress and many state legislatures will be a major test of Trump’s appeal to voters two years after he resoundingly beat the Democratic candidate Kamala Harris to return to the White House. With polls showing that the president is disliked by majorities of voters and his Republican allies are at risk of losing their control of the House of Representatives, the president’s Thursday evening speech rehashing allegations about the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden sparked fears he was already looking for ways to ensure November’s results are in his favor.
Joe Morelle, the top Democrat on the House administration committee, which includes federal elections in its jurisdiction, called the president’s speech “pathetic and unserious rantings” that served as “a pretext to undermine the results in November by casting false doubt on the integrity of our democratic systems”.
“Real election security is not about helping one politician save face. It is about making sure every American citizen can cast a ballot freely and have it counted fairly,” Morelle said.
The Georgia senator Jon Ossoff, who is the most imperiled Democratic facing re-election in November, said he heard Trump “signaling his unmistakable intent to attack these elections and our voting rights, just as he tried to throw out our votes and seize the presidency in 2020”.
The administration of elections falls to the states, and in a joint statement, the nation’s 24 Democratic governors said: “It’s deeply alarming that President Trump continues to try to undermine free and fair elections. No amount of lies and conspiracy theories can change the fact that our country’s elections have repeatedly been proven to be safe and secure.”
Cisco Aguilar, chair of the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said: “That was some bullshit.”
In his speech, Trump repeated his demand that Congress pass the Save America Act, which would ban mail-in ballots nationwide and impose new identification requirements on voters when they register and report to polls. But the measure has no path to passage through the Senate, where Democrats universally oppose it and attempts by rightwing Republicans to weaken the filibuster to facilitate its passage have gone nowhere.
Nonetheless, many of the bill’s proponents seized on the president’s speech to renew their demand the legislation be passed.
“American elections should not be less secure than Olive Garden’s endless pasta,” said the Republican senator Mike Lee, one of the measure’s biggest cheerleaders in the chamber. “Pass the SAVE America Act.”
The top Republicans in Congress were comparatively silent. Neither the House speaker, Mike Johnson, nor the Senate majority leader, John Thune, were in the room for Trump’s speech, and as of Friday morning, neither had publicly commented on it.
Johnson is pressing ahead with what will probably be an unsuccessful attempt to include the Save America Act in legislation that can pass both chambers along party lines, but only if it deals with budgetary matters. Thune, meanwhile, has faced blowback from rightwing activists who say he has not done enough to get the president’s priority bill passed.
Should the Senate attempt again to pass the Save America Act, the Democratic minority leader, Chuck Schumer, said his party would never relent in their opposition to the bill.
“The courts have rejected it, Congress has rejected it, even members of your own party have rejected it – give it up,” Schumer said. The Save America Act “isn’t going anywhere. Period,” he said.
Even some of the president’s erstwhile allies found his speech wanting.
On X, the Republican former congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene outlined an array of unproven theories of fraud in recent elections, while claiming that only Trump supporters had been punished. She went on to call the president’s address “just a big shiny object for Maga to distract them away from the Iran War, Epstein files, and massive failure to deliver campaign promises”.
Congressman Thomas Massie, who in May lost his primary in Kentucky after the president backed his challenger, wrote that Trump’s claim of China stealing voter data and US intelligence agencies covering up the theft was “absurd”, because such information is typically publicly available for a fee.
Tiffany Muller, president of advocacy group End Citizens United, warned that the president “tried to sell the American people a lie” because “he wants to take over our elections and rig November for Republicans”.
“Republicans are headed for a loss in the midterms because voters are fed up with their corrupt governance that only serves billionaires at the expense of working families. Instead of winning on ideas and providing relief to the American people, he’s trying to change the rules to help his party,” Muller said.
