The prospect of fair and unencumbered midterm elections took an ominous turn on Thursday evening following a prime-time television address by president Donald Trump in which he announced the immediate declassification of documents “revealing vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure” and told whatever number of Americans watching that “there is no Third World country that has elections like we have.”The 27-minute address returned to the theme upon which Trump has fixated for the past six years: his insistent allegation, despite repeated local, state and federal court findings to the contrary, that the 2020 general election was “rigged” in favour of the winner, Joe Biden. Several television networks, including ABC and NBC, opted not to carry the address while CNN aired selected clips while fact-checking Trump’s statements as he spoke. Trump’s address came less than 24 hours after a deeply unsettling address by Steven Miller. The White House deputy chief of staff for policy announced at a Republican conference, on The Resurgence of Political Terrorism, that the administration has “taken the necessary and essential action of formally recognising left-wing violence as a form of political terrorism that is a direct threat to national security and the survival of our Republican form of government”.President Trump’s address stated that the newly released documents prove a mass compromise of election data by the People’s Republic of China, involving some 220 million files; that the CIA had evidence of Chinese manipulation in the 2018 midterms and the 2020 election; that China wanted Trump out because “they knew I was wise to them, charged them billions and billions in tariffs and built the largest military in the world.” He claimed American voters have been “blatantly lied to” about the security of electronic voting and ballot-counting systems, alluded to a large-scale voter fraud operation in Michigan and said that the administration is now in the “process of notifying the states whose election data was compromised” and said that it would be “working closely to mitigate harm.” Homeland security secretary Markwayne Mullin would, he said, elaborate on this on Friday. The Chinese embassy in Washington swiftly released a statement denying the allegations, countering that it “has never and will never interfere in the presidential elections of the US”.The scenario was a prelude to what stands as Trump’s most direct and formal demand that Republicans in Congress pass the SAVE [Safeguard American Voter Eligibility] America Act.“This landmark Bill requires that all voters must show photo voter ID,” he said. “How simple is that?”The tone and implicit threat contained within the address will alarm those American voters who fear that the biggest threat to free and fair American elections is, in fact, the sitting president. His repeated and insistent claims about the 2020 presidential election were rigorously checked. His refusal to acknowledge Biden as the elected winner has slipped into the Republican vernacular: just this week, the new director of national intelligence nominee, Jay Clayton, declined to answer the question ‘who won the 2020 election?’ – posed by Georgia Democratic senator Jon Ossoff.Presidential prime-time addresses hold nothing like the shock and awe of old, partly because of the fractured nature of 21st century media and also because president Trump is on the television screen more often than reruns of Friends.Video monitors in the White House briefing room carry a live feed of Donald Trump. Photograph: Doug Mills/The New York Times