By all accounts the speech, which I didn’t watch, was a flop. Certainly the hard-right sites like Breitbart reported Trump’s claims as gospel. Fox News — having had to pay $787 million to Dominion Voting Systems — reported it carefully and with a notable lack of enthusiasm. The rest of media tore it apart. There was a lot of real-time fact checking, I understand.
Today’s follow up from Homeland Security secretary Markwayne Mullin was nonetheless disturbing. Mullin is threatening states that don’t comply with Trump’s “election security” measures, which includes a demand that states run their voter rolls through a federal database maintained by DHS to determine which voters are and are not allowed to vote. Today he ramped up the pressure:
“If the election officials, once we gave them the information they need to secure their elections, and they chose not to, then those individuals can also be held accountable by fines, by penalties and even, depending on how far it goes, prison time,” Mr. Mullin said.
The speech may have been a joke, but the plans are not.
One of the most interesting takes on the speech is from David Frum at The Atlantic, Trump Dooms His Own Party.
If you are an anti-Trump voter who watched all or part of tonight’s speech to the nation, you saw a president removed from reality, babbling about conspiracy theories, threatening your right to vote. You probably came away from the speech alarmed, angry, and motivated.
If, on the other hand, you are pro-Trump, you heard a message of despair. Your president, in whom you trust, described a hopelessly compromised voting system, so broken that it fooled even Trump himself in his first presidency. Between the Chinese, the illegal aliens, and the hated liberal media, your vote will probably count for nothing. Plus, it’s crooked and unpatriotic to vote by mail. It’s all hopeless. Why bother?
Frum recalls that a few years ago Trump’s incessant whining about the “fake” and “rigged” 2020 elections helped hand both of Georgia’s U.S. Senate seats to Democrats. And Trump’s speech last night was entirely about Trump and his own grievances. It did the Republican candidates facing the midterms no good at all. In Trump’s mind he possibly thought his speech might get the SAVE America Act passed, but I still don’t think it has the votes in the Senate. Frum concludes,
Trump is always about Trump first. Tonight was about Trump alone. He’s abandoned his allies because it’s his nature; he cannot help it. Soon he’ll discover what it’s like to be even more isolated and embattled than he needed to be, because he could not speak for—or about—anything other than himself.
There are a lot of things Trump could do to help his party win the midterm elections. He could talk about issues voters care about. He might even have allowed the Republicans to have their big signing ceremony over the housing bill that quietly became law last week without Trump’s signature. Instead, he called it a “yawn.” But Trump can’t be bothered. Yet he’s frantic to get the SAVE America Act passed because he thinks it will win the midterms for Republicans (I have questions about that, but let’s go on).
Something Chris Hayes has said several times is that Trump would rather cheat than win. I dimly remember Mary Trump saying something along those lines, too. Basically, he doesn’t see why he should have to do the work when he can find a way to cheat and get what he wants. It’s a lifelong pattern with him. Campaigning was fun for him in 2016, especially the big rallies, but those don’t seem to work for him as well any more. Whether he will have campaign rallies with candidates as we get closer to the November election I cannot say. Whether Republican candidates want him to rally with them I cannot say, either.
Now he just wants to stuff his pockets and build monuments to himself and not be bothered with the governing thing. One would think he’s paying attention to his war in Iran, but it’s hard to say. There are reports today that the U.S. has escalating bombing, destroying bridges and an airport. Oh, and the Strait of Hormuz is closed. I assume Trump has signed off on the bombing. But he’s not saying what he hopes to gain. The ever-shifting reasons he started the war in the first place seem to have fallen away. He’s stuck in it because he doesn’t know how to get out of it without looking like a loser.
And because oil prices will no doubt go up, the economy will be screwed for the foreseeable future. And into the midterms. Republicans must see this.
And some of them may see that the SAVE America Act would suppress Republican votes as well as Democratic ones. A few of them anyway.
David Graham also wrote about the speech at The Atlantic. See Trump’s Plan for November Is Failing.
The speech was a sign of desperation. Trump spoke now not only to distract from his sputtering Iran war and its effects on the economy, but also because his attempts to concretely interfere with the 2026 election thus far have almost all failed. As his opportunities to change the rules of the game before November slip away from him, the president is falling back on one of the few tools he has left: attempting to sow chaos and doubt among Americans.
He’s not desperate enough to do his job as President, of course. That’s probably just as well. It’s way over his head,
It is true; if you want to be a really big real estate developer, you want to value your contracting contacts, so that they'll love to work for you, because you treat them fair, and listen to them when they tell you something is difficult-expensive and difficult-impossible.Instead of doing that, Trump cheated contractors. Trump eventually managed to dance ahead of the bank's notes to have an "empire"
I think you can sum up Trump's personality simply: Trump likes to hurt people. He'd rather cheat a contractor, because he gets to hurt him, rather than pay him and let that smug bastard be all happy with Trump's money. Did you ever see Better Call Saul, the spinoff of Breaking Bad? Mike, the competent ex-cop, and Saul are talking about two million dollars that was in a bag, on the desk. Saul couldn't believe he didn't grab some of the cash (when it ended up vanishing, I believe); Mike was at peace with himself, because it was never his money in the first place, it was just something he was there to guard.
Well, Mike is a normal, "good" businessman, and Saul, and Trump, are two of a kind. If it's there, they take it. If it's not nailed to the floor, well, that counts as "there" for the taking. Ergo, they can't be at peace with someone else making a big solo score, when they could have cheated their way into a percentage.
If they truly had enlightened self interest, they'd be so much better for the world, because, people tend to make business deals win-win, I get goods/services, you get money, or vice versa, and everybody goes home happy. But for Trump, the ability to hurt someone, any which way he can, seems to be a powerful motivation throughout his life. Epstein said his one pleasure in life seemed to be cuckolding his soi disant "friend's" (i.e., having sex with their wives, because he can). If you don't account for "does it hurt people?" you're probably missing part of Trump's motivation.
May the courts save us from President Sundowner's desperations. I read he threatened to revoke NBC's and ABC's licenses for not carrying his speech. At least the majority of outlets are refusing to platform lies (whether that's the intention or not).
North Carolina, where I lives for a while a few decades back, has some interesting derivations of English. One colloquialism is "might could", which is redneck for "it's hypothetically possible that…" and it usually means they are advocating something implausible like the moon walk was done in Hollywood or the earth is flat.
The speech was basically that argument, but the argument was that (and I paraphrase) "if hypothetically Smartmatic could be hacked in Columbia, then it was hacked in GA, and since it was hacked in GA then several of the other states I lost in 2020, also voted for me. Ergo, I won in a landslide."
Trump tried repeatedly to get the courts to accept his reasoning as sound legal proof and they found it 80 proof. So Trump knows that if he does not steal a lost election before the votes are counted, he won't succeed in court after the election. A lot of big things that Trump needs have NOT broken his way. He has not taken over the media, though he's left some big dents in the assault. He has not passed the laws that would allow the federal government to disqualify enough voters to flip a lost election. And he's out of time. In days, the House will be gone from DC for all of August to try to save their incumbent asses in very early November. The two months of September and October are too late to pull a legislative rabbit out of Congress with the narrow margins that exist.
Trump understands dominating the 24-hour news cycle. When the House Oversight Committee can open televised hearings and call witnesses, the megaphone changes hands. A shitload of unpopular topics can be made part of the news, gas prices, health care prices, subsidies to farmers who have lost various international markets, higher food prices, the damage done to the military by forcing out rock-solid leadership for the sin of not bending the knee to a nincompoop. Victims of ICE, and those who can't be witnesses because they are dead. Insider trading and other forms of corruption, the sale of presidential pardons… I remember that after Trump suggested drinking Clorox, they shut down the WH press room completely. Questions from the press about testimony to the House about administration screw-ups could force them to circle the wagons so tight they look like a political porcupine. All defense, all denial, evidence and facts be damned. Not a good look going into 2027 and '28.
Republicans in Congress are saying the votes are not there to pass SAVE. Trump is wasting what little time and unity there is beating a dead horse. I predict that when Congress is out of session, Trump will STILL flog that subject. I think Trump is already trying to do through political extortion what SAVE might do if it passed and if the courts allowed it.
The speech was a nothingburger but it may go down in history as a turning point, like the Doolittle raid over Tokyo. Strategically, it did nothing, but from that point on, Japan was defending a shrinking empire. MAGA thinks they are winning. I think they have lost and don't know it.
You hear "might could" and "use to could" in the Ozarks also.
Nicolle Wallace has been mentioning, a lot, that trump basically admitted that the only rigged election was the one run by his administration and he "lost". It's a tacit admission that the Democrats, Obama and Biden, ran two elections he won, and that he ran the one he lost. By all accounts he didn't realize it until someone told him afterward.
Then he also managed to provide proof that the whole Russia thing in 2016 wasn't a hoax after all.
He's not only losing it badly but he's surrounded by morons who write his speeches for him who often don't seem to understand the very words they write.