On Thursday night, President Donald Trump will address the nation live on television, the formula used by all commanders in chief when they have something really important to announce. It will be the fourth time in this term. The first, in June 2025, was to report on the bombings of Iranian nuclear facilities. The second, at the end of December, generated many rumors and speculation, but the president surprised by simply reviewing his first year and boasting about what he considered all his economic successes, with no news. On April 1, he addressed the situation in Iran, a month after the start of the war.
With the return of hostilities with Tehran, most of the country thought this Monday upon hearing the announcement that the speech would be dedicated again to foreign policy. However, as MS Now advanced and other media later confirmed, everything points to the president making a "potpourri," but the central theme will be national. Trump will be accompanied by the CIA director; FBI director, Kash Patel; the Secretary of Homeland Security, Markwayne Mullin; and a key figure, Bill Pulte, the new Director of National Intelligence (DNI) to talk about something very different, his great obsession: the alleged irregularities in the 2020 elections, which he lost to Joe Biden.
"A White House task force, which is reviewing thousands of pages of classified intelligence and law enforcement documents in search of evidence of irregularities in the US elections, is expected to begin releasing documents in the coming weeks, according to two US officials familiar with the matter who informed MS NOW," the media outlet wrote.
The significance of the issue cannot be underestimated. Trump has never accepted his loss and repeats almost every day that there was massive fraud. He filed dozens of lawsuits at the time, all of which were dismissed. Several of his associates, including Rudy Giuliani, were ordered to pay millions in damages for defaming election officials. Some of his lawyers reached agreements with the prosecution admitting they had acted improperly. But Trump, who also unsuccessfully pressured Republican authorities in states like Georgia to help him challenge the result, never gave up, and now from power, he has many more resources.
As celebrated last night by his followers, after reading several MAGA influencers, the president could even announce that the two Georgia senators, Jon Ossoff and Raphael Warnock, are ILLEGITIMATE due to electoral fraud, wrote polemicist Benny Johnson, for example. Both are Democrats.
A few days ago, the government dismissed or pushed out the last three active members of the US Election Assistance Commission (EAC). Two of them, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland (Democrats), were fired via an email sent by the White House Office of Presidential Personnel. The third, Christy McCormick, a Republican, resigned. The fourth seat had been vacant since April, leaving the commission without any members.
The EAC was created by Congress after the controversial 2000 elections, the Bush vs. Gore elections that were resolved when the Supreme Court ordered a halt to a recount in Florida, to assist states in administering elections. It does not organize elections, as those are state competencies, but certifies voting systems and machines, distributes federal grants to election agencies, and issues recommendations and technical standards.
A Key Purge
The political moment is crucial. The purge of the agency comes a few months before the midterm legislative elections, which will be held in November, and just after the Supreme Court ruled that laws allow the president to dismiss officials of independent agencies. The White House argued that the officials were not "aligned" with its goal of ensuring electoral security. Critics, however, argue that it is an attempt to increase control over an agency designed to be bipartisan and independent. Another attempt, as Republicans and specifically Trump's allies have been placing key pieces in state apparatuses for years, and the Executive has already made many moves in preparation for November.
According to MS NOW, Harmeet Dhillon, an official appointed by Trump to the Department of Justice who has repeatedly tried to obtain voter data from half a dozen states, "threatened state election officials across the country by letter on Tuesday with criminal proceedings if they counted ballots cast by non-US citizens." Something that, obviously, is not legal and is already prohibited, but seeks to amplify the president's theories.
The role of the aforementioned Bill Pulte, a loyalist of the president who until recently was in a real estate agency from which he provided information about mortgages of high-ranking officials or members of the Federal Reserve to be dismissed, is critical in this process, after Trump appointed him interim Director of National Intelligence (DNI) replacing the controversial Tulsi Gabbard, who announced her resignation at the end of May.
Gabbard did not have jurisdiction over elections as head of the DNI, but she played a significant role where she did: electoral security, albeit in a very different way from her predecessors. There, she promoted an agenda focused on investigating alleged vulnerabilities in voting systems and reviewed the intelligence agencies' actions regarding the 2020 elections, an orientation that generated strong criticism. Additionally, she was present, in a completely anomalous manner, in an equally unprecedented FBI operation in Fulton County, Georgia, one that has always obsessed Trump supporters. From there, she put the president on the phone to speak with the agents who seized hundreds of boxes with records from the 2020 elections.
"We have to straighten out the elections"
Trump did not give many clues about the speech last night. "Our elections are corrupt and we have to straighten them out," he said in an interview on the conservative Newsmax channel, rambling about how some of his candidates who were leading the counts ended up losing, something he only sees possible with cheating. "Something has to be done about mail-in votes and proof of citizenship," he insisted, urging Congress to pass a controversial law promoted by his supporters to change the voting requirements.
Trump stuck to his usual complaints, but among conservative media and internet figures close to the president, a line that has been tried unsuccessfully for six years was revived: a conspiracy with a foreign power to alter the election result. But not Russia, as was investigated at the time, finding links to several important Trump allies (who always refer to that process as the 'Russia hoax, Russia, Russia, Russia'), but another.
"We are going to see revelations that go to the heart of the administrative state and the deep state. Part of this will focus on elections, what they have done in the past to steal elections, assist foreign entities in elections, suppress information, and withhold information," announced Steve Bannon on his daily program, giving voice to guests who questioned the recent Democratic victories in local and state elections, including the New York City mayoralty, where socialist Zohran Mamdani swept. "We will never allow elections to be stolen again, including these midterm elections. That could require ICE agents at polling stations to ensure that illegal immigrants cannot vote in US elections," Bannon said repeatedly.
A deal with Maduro?
In the foreign interference line mentioned by Bannon, a few weeks ago, the rumor also resurfaced in Washington circles that the administration, in excellent relations with the Venezuelan government, was trying to negotiate a deal with Nicolás Maduro to get him out of jail or even drop charges against him if he agreed to testify acknowledging some kind of involvement of his country in that interference and rigging of those elections.
What seems unbelievable from the outside was, for a long time, the argument put forward by Sidney Powell and Rudy Giuliani. Powell, who served as Trump's legal affairs spokesperson and campaign lawyer in 2016—and was one of the members of the legal team that defended his case in Georgia—reached a plea deal with prosecutors, pleading guilty and testifying against her associates in exchange for avoiding prison. The conspiracy theory at the time was a convoluted one that was repeatedly dismissed in court and traced back to Hugo Chávez, who died in 2013 but who, according to them, had devised a plan to influence the election through software from the company Smartmatic—which they claimed was capable of altering votes on Dominion Voting Systems machines, used in numerous U.S. states.
In a November 2020 appearance, following Biden's victory, both Trump allies claimed that, in addition to Venezuela, Cuba and China were behind the alleged manipulation. Giuliani spoke of a "national conspiracy," and Powell of a plot led by communist regimes. Nothing was ever proven, and even Fox News had to pay a fortune for having broadcast these theories without any evidence—a move that led to the firing of the controversial host Tucker Carlson, a former Trump ally who has now fallen from grace.