The era of Start the Steal has begun. I’ll have some more exclusive findings tomorrow about election interference efforts in Georgia. For now, a rundown of Trump’s address last night. Subscribe, support and share. - jg

Last night, President Donald Trump spoke to the nation in an address in which he hyped overblown claims of fraud in the 2020 election as he kicked off Republican attempts to overturn the results of November’s mid-terms.

The speech will be looked back upon as one the strangest and most obvious threats to American democracy from an elected official in the country’s history.

The only real new developments the president mentioned were an error-filled DHS estimate that 278,000 undocumented immigrants are registered to vote across the country, and that China accessed the voter registration information of 200 million Americans back in 2020.

First, the estimate that 278,000 undocumented immigrants are registered to vote isn’t even correct according to the documents released by the White House itself. Those documents show that a little more than 10,000 noncitizens were found on voter rolls nationwide. The only way to reach the 278,000 number is by adding dead voters to that number of noncitizens.

I can’t stress enough how incompetent this is. Prior to Trump’s address, DHS leaked the 278,000 claim to Politico as if were a major finding — but DHS’ own findings don’t show that. Trump nor DHS claimed that any of these 10,000 noncitizens actually voted.

The China claim is interesting — but comes from 2016, not 2020, according to the documents release last night. Alos, voter registration information is largely public and not hard to come by. Political parties, individual candidates, non-profit organizations, lawyers and many more regularly access the type of information that China is accused of obtaining. What China allegedly did in 2020 may not even have been illegal.

So, Trump had no smoking gun because he never has — and because it doesn’t exist. But that wasn’t really the point of the address. The reason that the people around Trump and Republicans in Congress are letting this madness go on as we approach the mid-terms is that it’s good for them politically. Frightening and angering their base of voters increases the odds that Republicans might be able to hold onto power in Congress.

Led by a historically unpopular president, those odds are long.

The second reason most Republicans are willing to go along with Trump’s election lies is because they will help them claim the mid-terms were stolen from them when they lose. From there, Republicans in Congress and elsewhere will attempt to legally maneuver Democrats out of their wins, a story I’ll have coming out in the next few weeks.

Simply put: unable and unwilling to appeal to voters — or really anyone not named Donald Trump — Republicans in Washington and across the country are engaged in an organized and sweeping plot to undo the will of American voters in November.

For his part, Trump has to do everything he can to help Republicans win in November so that a Democrat-controlled Congress won’t hold him accountable for the crimes and impeachable offenses he and his administration commit on a weekly basis.

Last night, Trump simply provided specific talking points to be used in efforts to reverse the outcome of an election that Republicans are favored to lose.

But let’s be clear about the fundamental reason this is all happening — again. Trump cannot accept that the American people told him “no” in 2020. A civilly-convicted rapist, Trump simply cannot stand that he was told “no” by voters, just as he wouldn’t accept the word “no” from the woman he raped, or the two dozen some-odd women who have credibly accused him of assaulting them. We don’t have to take their word for it — Trump himself said he can simply grab women “by the pussy” if he feels like it.

Trump couldn’t stand being told “no” in 2016 when he said Ted Cruz “illegally stole” the Iowa caucuses that showed Cruz winning there. Trump couldn’t stand it when he barely beat Hillary Clinton in 2016, and then formed a task force on election integrity that was quickly disbanded after finding no evidence of widespread voter fraud. And Trump still can’t stand that the American people told him “no” in 2020.

He especially can’t stand that it happened thanks in large part to Black voters in Fulton County, Georgia.

If Trump’s address actually contained damning information about the 2020 election, it would have come in the form of a court filing — a DOJ affidavit against foreign powers or domestic officials who took part in the fraud — but that was not the case. In the world of U.S. elections over the last six years, we often talk about press releases that are disguised as affidavits and lawsuits — legal filings making bombshell allegations that then never see their day in court for, you know, lack of actual evidence. This wasn’t even that — if Trump had the smoking gun, his DOJ would be filing as such in court. It’s not, and there’s a reason for that.

Trump’s address covered a wide variety of areas that have been the obsession of the election denial movement for years. All of this is also probably aimed at creating some sort of legal mechanism that would allow Trump to declare a national emergency, force passage of the SAVE Act — which will help to prevent millions from voting — and do things like call in immigration agents or the military to polling locations in order to intimidate voters and seize ballots, voting machines and other materials in places where Republicans lost. You know, like the FBI has already done right here in Georgia.

But even Trump stopped short of that emergency declaration last night. That doesn’t mean it’s not coming, but I think it’s an important distinction to make.

Much of Trump’s claims dealt with vulnerabilities in online election systems, including voter registration databases. During his second administration, Trump has gutted government agencies tasked with protecting these systems and data.

Nothing in last night’s address included new claims that actual votes were manipulated in 2020. Instead, Trump just repeated a bunch of things that were already known, exaggerated some others, made some stuff up, and claimed that all of this means someone could manipulate actual votes (they can’t).

The address was a nothingburger — boring, dumb, overblown, but harmful nonetheless. Millions of Americans will now even more fervently believe lies that elections aren’t secure, priming them to believe more lies when Republicans lose fair and square in November.

In the wake of his loss in 2020, Trump’s own intelligence community — led by then-DNI John Ratcliffe, who Trump still likes enough to employ as director of the CIA — found no credible evidence that any foreign power was able to manipulate votes.

“We have no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 US elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results,” the first finding of Ratcliffe’s report made clear.

So what has changed between then and now? Two impeachments, to start. Now, Republicans are likely to lose the House of Representatives in November, and possibly the Senate as well. Trump expects to be impeached if and when that happens for the many and obvious crimes he has and continues to commit. That’s why he’s so desperate for Republicans to win in November, regardless of who Americans actually choose to elect.

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