President Donald Trump on Thursday night used a historically stunning primetime address to peddle unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, taking a major political risk as Republicans fight for their congressional majorities and conjuring warnings from Democrats about November’s midterms.
Trump appeared eager to sow doubt about the results of November’s midterm elections a day after his vice president, JD Vance, said the administration would accept the outcome of congressional races. Trump tied his new allegations about the midterms to his recent aggressive push for Congress to send him the SAVE America Act, a package of GOP-crafted election restrictions that Senate leaders have told him cannot pass their chamber.
The administration was releasing hundreds of pages of previously classified information it claims would show “the largest compromise of election data in history,” the president said. Specifically, Trump accused China of the “illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files” through a special intelligence unit it created to focus on U.S. elections. He did not, however, directly link those alleged Chinese efforts to the changing of any Americans’ votes.
