Trump says primetime address will focus on 'free and fair elections'
Trump says primetime address will focus on 'free and fair elections'
Joey Garrison and Josh Meyer, USA TODAYTue, July 14, 2026 at 7:10 PM UTC
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WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump said he will discuss "free and fair elections" in his primetime address to the nation on Thursday, July 16, signaling that he could use the speech to revive grievances over the 2020 election and push for long-stalled legislation to overhaul voting in federal elections.
Trump's rare 9 p.m. ET address comes as he is still pushing unsubstantiated claims to assert that the 2020 election he lost to Joe Biden was stolen, while alleging ahead of the November elections that Democrats "cheat" to win.
"I'd rather save it, but it's really big news," Trump told reporters on July 14 in the Oval Office when asked whether he will address election integrity in his remarks. "It's really, really big news, and our country has to shape up. That's what we're going to be talking about Thursday. It doesn't get bigger because without free and fair elections, you don't have a country.
"We'll be discussing other things, too, but it will be a very big announcement," he added.
More: Trump moves to tighten federal control of elections ahead of midterms
Although Trump did not elaborate, Reuters cited an administration official saying the president will address newly declassified intelligence on investigations into U.S. elections and what the White House says are voting machine vulnerabilities.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation opened an investigation this year into the 2020 election results in Atlanta's Fulton County, Georgia, a heavily Democratic county in a state Biden narrowly won. The effort was dealt a blow on July 7 when a Trump-appointed federal judge quashed a grand jury subpoena seeking information on 2020 election workers in the county.
More: Trump's mail-in voting order halted by judge, impacting 2026 elections
In January, the FBI seized 2020 ballots and other elections records from the Fulton County Elections Hub and Operations Center. A different federal judge ruled in May that the bureau may keep those seized records.
'We all should be worried,' Democratic senator says
For weeks after Trump's November 2020 loss to Biden, Trump pushed baseless claims to try to overturn the election outcome, a stretch that culminated with pro-Trump rioters storming the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 26, 2021, while Congress was meeting to certify Biden's election win.
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Numerous courts, election audits and even Trump’s own election specialists in the Justice and Homeland Security departments found no evidence of such voting-machine tampering, foreign interference or widespread fraud.
More: Trump fires members of key election commission ahead of midterms
Sen. Mark Warner of Virginia, the ranking Democrat on the Senate Intelligence Committee, told USA TODAY on July 14 that he expects Trump to once again make long-debunked claims about voting irregularities, malign foreign interference and voting machine vulnerabilities in the 2020 election.
“This has been looked into countless times, and my fear is that either a single piece of intelligence or some dissenting view is going to be taken and magnified on national television and then used as an excuse for Lord knows what,” Warner said in an interview.
Warner said the fact that Trump is holding a rare national address on the issue is cause for concern that he is seeking to ramp up his efforts to interfere in the administration of the midterm elections rather than leave that to state elections officials.
“This is a president that's not had a lot of national addresses,” he said, “and if he's going to do a nationwide TV address on the subject, I think we all should be worried.”
Trump, who has long questioned the legitimacy of mail voting, signed an executive order in March seeking to exert federal control over voter rolls and mail-in ballots, but that effort has been blocked in court. Trump this month terminated the two Democratic-appointed members of the four-person federal Election Assistance Commission, eliminating the bipartisan panel's ability to help local elections officials prepare for the 2026 midterms. A third member, appointed by Republicans, resigned.
Trump has also repeatedly urged Republicans in Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, which would require photo identification and proof of citizenship to vote in federal elections and prohibit universal mail-in voting across the country.
The president wants Senate Republicans to abolish the filibuster, the Senate's 60-vote threshold, to allow Republicans to pass the legislation with a simple majority in the Republican-controlled body. Yet it's unclear whether the proposal has enough support to pass even if there were no filibuster. Four Republicans have signaled opposition to the bill.
Reach Joey Garrison on X @joeygarrison.
This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Trump says primetime address will focus on 'free and fair elections'
Source: “AOL Breaking”
