President Donald Trump is scheduled to speak to the nation Thursday evening at 9 p.m. ET, and he has indicated the address will cover elections and voting machines — raising the possibility that he will once again bring up long-discredited theories surrounding his 2020 presidential loss to Democrat Joe Biden. The planned speech follows his recent push for Republicans to tighten federal voting laws before November’s midterm elections.
Trump’s last primetime presidential address, delivered in April, included a claim that U.S. objectives related to Iran would be achieved “very shortly.” Since then, however, a series of back-and-forth military strikes between the U.S. and Iran across the Middle East and in the Strait of Hormuz has collapsed an interim agreement meant to pause the conflict. Early Thursday, U.S. strikes expanded to a broader range of targets, including a vessel accused of breaking a blockade on Iranian ports, while Iran responded by launching attacks against U.S. allies in the region.
In the weeks following Trump’s defeat in the 2020 election, officials he had personally appointed to lead the Department of Justice, cybersecurity agencies, and intelligence departments all concluded the same thing — that the election was conducted fairly, with no significant fraud or foreign interference.
Now in his second term, Trump has worked to challenge that well-established conclusion, and Thursday night’s address is expected to be another attempt to do so. He has already filled key positions with loyalists who have repeated his false claims that the 2020 election was stolen, and he has made it clear he expects those around him to align with his position.
In what observers have described as a loyalty test, many of Trump’s nominees have declined to directly state who won the 2020 election, instead offering only brief acknowledgments that Biden did serve as president.
When a reporter asked Trump on Tuesday whether the address would deal with “election machines and integrity,” he confirmed it would cover “that subject” and added that there would be “a couple of other things to say also.” Beyond that, he has offered little detail about the content of the speech.
In a separate development, an Associated Press analysis of federal data going back to 1989 found that Trump has taken longer on average to approve disaster relief requests than any other president on record. Since returning to office, Trump has approved roughly 65 major disaster declarations while denying more than two dozen others from states, tribes, and territories seeking federal aid following hurricanes, tornadoes, floods, storms, and wildfires. The analysis also found that no other president has shown such a wide gap in denial rates between states that politically supported him and those that did not.
