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President Donald Trump plans to revive his baseless claims of election fraud in the 2020 presidential race in a primetime address to the country later this week.
“President Trump will be making a Speech to the Nation on Thursday evening, at 9 P.M. Eastern,” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post on Monday. “Thank you for your attention to this matter!”
The post did not include any mention of what Trump planned to discuss. Later on Monday, it was revealed that Trump’s speech will focus on newly declassified intelligence reports that indicate a foreign nation may have attempted to interfere in the 2020 presidential race. The president will also discuss supposed vulnerabilities within voting machines, the White House indicated.
The speech comes as it has also been revealed that the administration has formed a task force to investigate the 2020 election, an effort spearheaded by Trump devotee and former Fox News contributor John Solomon.
Trump has long maintained, without evidence, that his loss to former President Joe Biden in the 2020 election was the result of widespread fraud. There isn’t any indication that these new reports will demonstrate that attempts to interfere in the election were successful, or show that widespread fraud actually affected the race’s outcome.
Importantly, while Trump has peddled conspiracy theories alleging that the election was “stolen” from him, it was his administration that was in power when the 2020 election took place. Dozens of attempts to convince judges to allow a delay in certifying the election failed, including from jurists appointed by Trump himself, as the president’s lawyers and other allies couldn’t provide evidence warranting such moves.
As a guest on Newsmax on Monday evening, Trump said that his upcoming speech would focus on “various things” but appeared to confirm that supposed election fraud would be the main topic.
Trump described U.S. election systems as both “crooked” and “rigged,” specifically singling out voting by mail.
“We’ve gotta straighten [elections] out. … We’ve got to do something about the mail-in ballots,” Trump said.
The president cited reality TV star Spencer Pratt’s recent loss in the Los Angeles mayoral primary race as more proof that mail-in ballots are untrustworthy. Pratt appeared to be doing well in the initial days of counting, but as mail-in votes came in, his lead diminished to the point where he no longer qualified to advance in the election.
There is no evidence that the outcome of the race was the result of fraud, and Trump didn’t provide any basis for his claim that the election was rigged.
Trump has railed against mail-in ballots for years, wrongly claiming that their being counted later on election nights indicates that the updated results are fraudulent. Despite lambasting the practice, Trump regularly uses mail-in voting to cast his own ballots.
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