On July 16th, Trump delivered an address to the nation from the East Room of the White House. The speech was nearly 30 minutes of rehashed claims of election fraud in 2020 and new claims that China acquired and exploited American voter data, American voting systems are vulnerable, and that there are mass amounts of non-citizens on state voter rolls. The claims, Trump said, were backed up by “newly released” intelligence documents. These documents, posted on the White House’s official website, include information already released to the public and unvetted claims provided to certain intelligence agencies.
For Trump’s most dedicated supporters, this information will validate their long-held belief that Joe Biden’s win in 2020 was illegitimate. It is unclear if this release will persuade those who never believed Trump’s claims. Convincing skeptics likely isn’t the point. Instead, Trump’s “strategy” is meant to sow enough doubt to keep alive the anger he was able to harness in 2020, and which ultimately led to the January 6, 2021, storming of the Capitol. Trump is simply re-running his 2020 playbook. This time, our democracy cannot afford another angry mob falling for it.
The Past
In 2020, Trump began his attempts to make sure that if he lost, it wasn’t because the voters rejected him, but rather the election was rigged. In April 2020, he falsely claimed that mail-in voting, the method most likely to be used during the raging COVID-19 pandemic, was fraudulent by nature. He repeated that claim on Fox News in July 2020, refusing to say whether he would accept the results of the election. In August and September that same year, Trump stoked the flames of conspiracy theories and riled up white nationalists, even telling the racist group the Proud Boys during a campaign debate to “stand back and stand by.”
After it was clear he lost the election, Trump ramped up his election denial rhetoric from November 2020 through his last few months in office. While he was a lame duck, Trump called on Republican members of Congress to overturn the election results, sued a multitude of states to challenge the results of the election, and pressured Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to “find” the votes he needed to win.
Becoming increasingly desperate, Trump sought to prevent the January 6th certification of the Electoral College vote, holding a rally with a few thousand of his supporters on the National Mall. A mob of those supporters subsequently attacked the United States Capitol building where Congress was meeting to certify the vote, with some chanting “hang [then-Vice President] Mike Pence.” Multiple individuals told the FBI and reporters that they attacked the Capitol because they believed Trump told them to.
The Present
This time around, Trump has had the entirety of Biden’s term and more than a year and a half in his new administration to sow doubt about the election process and weaken the federal systems that support state election officials and election security. He clearly holds a grudge over his 2020 loss and has repeatedly rewarded those who were loyal to him about the 2020 results and punished those who were not. He has pardoned thousands of January 6th rioters, appointed numerous election deniers to key offices across his administration, demanded states hand over voter information, and written a multitude of executive orders that restrict voting rights, most of which are currently held up by court rulings.
Trump’s July address was no different. The centerpiece of the speech was an accusation that China had breached American election infrastructure and carried out the “largest compromise of election data in history,” resulting in the illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files containing names, addresses, phone numbers, and party affiliations. This data in most states, however, is publicly available for purchase.
The United States intelligence community has also long been aware of this problem, as it was included in their 2021 public assessment of foreign threats to U.S. elections. There is also no evidence that China did anything with this data, if they have it. Election security and tech expert Ryan Macias said, “Just because they have voter registration data does not mean that state or local voter registration databases or infrastructure have been breached. This data is information that can be legally purchased by certain members of the public.”
Trump’s speech heavily implied that China had directly interfered in U.S. elections, so much so that senior administration officials and Trump himself had to clarify the claims after the fact. In an interview with MS Now’s Vaughn Hillyard, John Solomon, a special government employee working on “election integrity,” said, “The intelligence community has zero evidence that…a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, ‘22, or ‘24.”
Trump also claimed that a Department of Homeland Security (DHS) review found “approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.” For this claim, there was no methodology provided for how DHS got to this number, and many experts warn against trusting the review. Commercially available data, like what was used in the review, does not provide the unique identifiers needed to discern citizenship status.
Even if these individuals were registered, there is no proof that they voted in federal elections. In fact, individuals who are not U.S. citizens voting in U.S. elections is exceedingly rare. An analysis of the data published by the far-right think tank Heritage Foundation found only 77 cases of noncitizen voting between 1999 and 2023, each of which was investigated by the appropriate authorities.
Even in New Jersey, where a software error registered thousands of non-citizens to vote, only 400 voted in 2023 and 2024, according to an announcement from New Jersey Governor Mike Sherrill’s office. Those 400 people represent around .02 percent of votes cast in the 2023 state elections and .009 percent of votes cast in the 2024 presidential election.
In an interview following Trump’s speech, Executive Director of the Center for Election Innovation & Research David Becker told CBS News, “This administration has been in total control of the federal government for 18 months. They’ve redirected untold taxpayer resources to try to uncover evidence of massive voter fraud, and at the end of those 18 months, all we got is more rehashed, debunked conspiracy theories, many of which we’ve known about before and already knew didn’t affect our elections.”
Trump’s election fraud claims did spread across fringe platforms such as Gab, Rumble, Telegram, Scored, and Truth Social (which Trump owns), where far-right extremists often congregate and sometimes call for violence against Trump’s political opponents. The reactions to Trump’s address were no different. Users claimed so-called “election thieves” were guilty of treason and deserving of capital punishment, made calls saying, “this is war,” and fantasized about Trump executing members of Congress.
One Truth Social user reacts to Trump’s speech by calling for the “capital punishment” of Trump’s political opponents. (Source: Truth Social).
Following Trump’s address, users on Gab fantasize about Trump executing his political opponents for treason. (Source: Gab).
More broadly, talk of election fraud skyrocketed across these platforms. Mentions of election denial-related terms on these platforms rose from 1,379 on July 15 to 3,642 on July 16 (the day of Trump’s address), representing a 164 percent increase. These numbers show, once again, that the President’s words matter, particularly to his supporters active on platforms where extremism and hate speech runs rampant.
The Future?
The 2020 playbook worked in increasing mistrust and mobilizing supporters because doubt doesn’t need to convince everyone; it only needs to convince enough people, for long enough, to justify whatever comes next. In 2020, that meant a mob at the Capitol. In 2026, with institutional guardrails already weaker and a midterm that likely will not be favorable to Trump’s agenda, the “what comes next” is hard to predict.
According to a recent GPAHE-commissioned poll, 44 percent of Americans are not confident that our elections will be free and fair. Democrats are more resistant to the voter fraud narrative than Republicans and Independents, with 67 percent of Democrats believing that there is little to no election fraud from individuals and 63 percent believing there is little to no fraud from election officials. This contrasts with Republicans at 47 percent and 50 percent, respectively, and Independents at 45 percent and 43 percent, respectively. Women, 48 percent, especially women under 35, 55 percent, are the least confident that no fraud is being committed by election officials.
Regionally, concern about fraud committed by individuals is highest in the South in red states such as Alabama, Kentucky, Mississippi, and Tennessee. More than half, 53 percent, are not confident that there is little to no fraud from individuals, despite numerous studies to the contrary. These responses show that the false idea that ineligible people vote at high rates has particularly taken root in these states.
If the past predicts the future, we should be worried. The main difference this time is that the people who are supposed to check claims of election fraud are within institutions that Trump has spent his term reshaping in his own image. Then there is the fact that sections of the American electorate have been primed and conditioned by Trump to believe the false claim of mass voter fraud. The last time he tried this, the system barely held, and Americans watched in horror the riots at the Capitol on January 6. The question now is whether there’s enough of that system left standing to withstand another coordinated effort to overturn an election.
Below, GPAHE has chronicled Trump’s efforts so far this term to subvert elections and gut our democracy. While Trump has spent time ensuring that there are fewer people in government to fact-check him, GPAHE remains committed to resisting authoritarianism and protecting our democracy. The truth is the best disinfectant.
