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President Donald Trump has continued to perpetuate debunked claims about U.S. elections, and now, experts are sounding the alarm to Politico, warning that the president's rhetoric is the real danger, injecting poison into the electoral process.

In a piece published Saturday, Politico cited conversations with various experts about American elections, in which they warned that Trump's rhetoric about voting machines being unsafe was doing real damage by potentially sowing distrust in the minds of the public. While noting that there are issues with the systems that ought to be talked about and fixed, they stressed that none of these issues have ever come close to being enough to flip an election, as Trump has claimed for the better part of a decade now.

"Flaws in electronic voting machines have been well-documented for more than a decade by researchers, and states have poured money into bolstering security," Politico explained. "Still, none have ever been exploited by malicious actors to successfully change the outcome of an election. Now officials are worried that Trump’s latest comments — when he claimed that 'Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including the security of electronic voting machines' — could undermine the electorate’s fundamental faith in voting. Without confidence in the system, the entire process could be called into question, as voters choose not to cast ballots or refuse to accept election results."

“There’s nothing wrong with pointing out vulnerabilities and therefore doing audits or therefore upgrading to a more modern system that uses a paper record,” Gowri Ramachandran, director of elections and security at the Brennan Center for Justice’s Elections and Government Program, told the outlet. “What’s wrong is trying to use those vulnerabilities to spread distrust in elections.”

"I’m not aware of an incident in which a vote has been changed through a hack,” Scott Algeier, executive director of the Information Technology Information Sharing and Analysis Center, also added. “There’s lots of opportunity for that to happen because we have lots of elections, and I think the fact that it hasn’t happened is an indication of how secure the overall election process is.”

Despite the claims of Trump and his MAGA backers, Politico noted that there has been "no evidence" over the years that any malicious actors, foreign or domestic, have been able to hack into electronic systems and change votes. The latest files released by Trump only revealed that "Russian hackers successfully accessed the voter registration databases of a few U.S. states ahead of the 2016 elections," though they did not alter any votes. China was also able to access certain registration databases, though reports have noted that many states make such records available to the public.

Vulnerabilities in electronic systems have been known about within the industry for years, with efforts underway to spread the word about them and implement fixes. Concerns about Russian interference in 2016 led many states to move away from entirely electronic systems and "towards either using paper ballots or electronic machines with paper trails."

"As a result, only around 4 percent of registered voters currently live in regions where only direct recording electronic systems are used for voting, ensuring that there is a paper trail documenting how the vast majority of Americans voted," Politico noted.

"These are machines that very few Americans actually vote on anymore, where they would pick their selections on a touchscreen, and then the computer would record the selection in its internal system and not actually provide any kind of paper record," Ramachandran added.

President Donald Trump’s obsession with unfounded claims of election fraud has defined his second term in office. But in recent months his fixation has moved from executive nominee litmus tests and executive orders reinforcing proof of citizenship to vote into legislation – dragging Congress into the fray.

The Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or the SAVE America Act, featured heavily in Trump’s primetime speech on July 16, 2026.

It’s become the focus of the administration in recent months, eclipsing prior legislative efforts by proposing stringent and widespread voting changes. The proposed law, which would federalize elections, require additional documentation in order to vote and curtail mail-in registration and ballots in all states, faces major logistical, legal and political hurdles.

The act, which is stuck in limbo between the U.S. House and Senate, has dominated and derailed the summer’s legislative calendar. In the House, Republican members delayed votes on major legislation in an effort to pressure the Senate to take the bill up for a vote, and it has become a sticking point in other unrelated legislation.

The controversial act has also soured the relationship between Trump and members of his party, leading him to refuse to sign a bipartisan housing bill passed by Congress. Although the bill became law without his signature, Trump’s preoccupation with the SAVE America Act ultimately denied congressional Republicans an opportunity to tout a bipartisan, popular policy win.

Yet, despite mounting political pressure, Congress hasn’t budged.

This tension between Trump’s priorities and congressional inaction is noteworthy because Republicans control both chambers. But as a political scientist who studies the evolving power of congressional leadership, I find inaction on the SAVE America Act to be more than a reflection of Trump’s waning popularity among Republican lawmakers. Rather, congressional hesitation on what would be the largest election reform in decades reflects an awareness of constituent needs and lawmakers’ own reelection risks.

What’s the latest?

House Republicans have been quick to blame the Senate – and the 60-vote filibuster threshold the legislation must overcome to receive a vote on the Senate floor – for the inaction.

House Speaker Mike Johnson has brought the legislation to the floor for at least three votes in an effort to pressure the Senate to take up the legislation. In July 2026, Johnson took a more creative approach, relenting to conservative lawmakers by including portions of the SAVE America Act in a House-passed bill to fund the State Department.

These actions are largely theatrical. Senate Majority Leader John Thune has said since February 2026 that there aren’t enough votes to move the SAVE America Act through the Senate, telling Fox News in June that “the votes currently aren’t there.” Although Senate Republicans could vote to remove the filibuster, which Trump has also requested, they have not.

Even in the House, the slim margins of Republican control have made it challenging for Johnson to keep the party together on the controversial issue. And Johnson’s gambit to attach the SAVE America Act to important legislation risks not only derailing bipartisan policy but another government shutdown, too.

If Republicans were serious about electoral reform, including moderate reforms that the majority of Americans do support, their approach would be like that used for other major legislation: bipartisan. Instead, partisan passage of a controversial bill, with a known Senate blockade, presents half-hearted strategy that avoids true responsibility.

Legal and logistical hurdles

The SAVE America Act would be confusing, time-consuming and expensive, and it would not provide funding to help states implement changes.

Changing election processes warrants precision and time, too. As Republican Sen. Thom Tillis noted, “Do you honestly believe that we can have this thing up in 50 states? There’s no funding. There’s no specific implementation instructions.”

Beyond logistics, the legality of federalizing election processes is murky.

Congress does have the power to mandate election requirements. But under Article 1, Section 4, of the Constitution, while Congress can outline parameters, states are responsible for election administration.

For example, the National Voter Registration Act of 1993 reinforced citizenship as a requirement, but states maintained responsibility for creating their own form and enrollment process. The SAVE America Act attempts to circumvent this by requiring federal possession of voter rolls.

Uncertainty for American citizens

Beyond legal challenges, the SAVE America Act introduces very real implications for American voters – and the members of Congress who represent them.

While the act’s stated goal is to ensure only citizens vote, citizenship requirements for voting are already federal law. In practice, many scholars believe the bill would make it more difficult for eligible voters to engage in the democratic process.

For rural Americans, most of whom are represented by Republican members of Congress, the act would sharply restrict mail-in registration and mail-in voting. More than 5 million Americans would need to drive an hour or more to register to vote, with some voters facing drives as long as eight hours.

For women who changed their name after marriage, a trait more likely to be associated with Republican women, voting would require marriage certificates in addition to birth certificates.

First-time voters, young voters on college campuses and voters who have recently moved could also face the hurdle of finding and presenting this documentation in person.

Members of Congress, particularly those who represent rural areas, are likely aware of this reality. Disenfranchising or, at best, confusing their voters risks their own electoral success, too.

Safety and security of upcoming elections

One of Trump’s first acts following the Supreme Court’s ruling in Trump v. Slaughter in June 2026, which allowed the president to remove executive branch officials without cause, was to fire the remaining members of the bipartisan, Senate-confirmed Election Assistance Commission.

The agency is the point of contact for states regarding election administration processes, offering resources, guidance and expertise on voting logistics. If the SAVE America Act were to pass, this office would be integral to ensuring changes are unbiased and fair across all 50 states.

Coupled with warnings that Trump may invoke emergency powers over election administration, aggressive actions by the Department of Justice to control voter rolls, partisan redistricting, and now a vacated election commission, the SAVE America Act risks further disrupting elections. All while these elections have already been secure and overwhelmingly free of fraud.

As Tillis noted to reporters, “They’re being disingenuous to suggest to the American people they could possibly be operational by this election. And so then it begins to make me wonder … if we’re just beginning to undermine the underlying integrity of any of our elections. And I think that’s dangerous, and I think it’s wrong.”

Trump’s grip on Republicans

Does Congress’ hesitation to pass the SAVE America Act reflect a weakened Trump grip on the Republican party? Possibly. The president is more unpopular than he has been at any point during his second term. Ignoring Trump on the SAVE America Act may be a risk worth taking to some members.

But for most Republican members of Congress, appeasing Trump remains key to primary and electoral success. The president’s record on primary endorsements – even for Senate incumbents – remains strong, as he continues to define the party. Among constituents, some provisions of the SAVE America Act are popular among MAGA-aligned voters, making it an important electoral issue for members representing deep-red districts.

By publicly supporting the act, but relying on the Senate to serve as a doorstop to House-passed legislation, Congress falls into a familiar pattern that allows conservative members to appeal to the president while using procedure to block legislation that would make major changes to voting, mere months from Election Day.

Congress’ hesitance to pass the SAVE America Act is more than a test of its relationship with Trump. It’s an example of Congress doing what it was intended to do: represent its constituents.

SoRelle Wyckoff Gaynor, Assistant Professor of Public Policy and Politics, University of Virginia

This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

Kentucky Gov. Andy Beshear (D) got two phone calls from different agencies suggesting that Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-Ky.) had died, the New Republic relayed.

This week, Beshear spoke with veteran newswoman Katie Couric, revealing that at the start of the rumors of McConnell's hospitalization, federal agency sources were saying he was gone.

McConnell's office produced a photo last weekend as proof of life after the governor requested it amid rampant conspiracy theories on social media.

“It had been a month before anything had been put out, not even an official statement from Senator McConnell,” Beshear said. “In fact, I’d gotten two calls from different agencies — not state agencies — suggesting he’s passed.”

His statement that they were not state agencies implies they were federal agencies.

Beshear spoke in a press conference this week, saying that the photo was a "step in the right direction," but requested that McConnell provide something more comprehensive to silence the conspiracy theories.

"To me, this is pretty easy," he said. "Most everybody who's subscribed to your Substack, if they were in the hospital for a month, they'd have to call their boss. They'd have to explain what's going on, how they're feeling, what their prognosis is, and when they can get back to work. And if they have the capacity to get back to work. Well, Mitch McConnell's boss are the people of Kentucky."

He said that the state deserves honesty from its U.S. senator, and noted it took a month before McConnell would even put out the photo.

"So, this rampant speculation that was out there," the governor explained," and "it needed to end. People deserve to know what was going on."

Now, Baashear wants McConnell to tell his state when he'll get back to work.

There's a key deadline of Aug. 3, after which, if McConnell cannot perform his duties as senator, a special election would be called. After Aug. 3, the seat would simply remain abandoned until the new lawmaker is sworn in, sometime in January.

"So, I've encouraged publicly that, you know, call in to your Substack. Call into a cable news show. Both the left and right have been contributing to the noise," said Beshear.

McConnell haters on the right, like Laura Loomer, were posting on social media that she'd heard from a "high-level source in the White House" that McConnell had already passed away. Even after the photo was released, Loomer still maintains that the senator is "brain dead."

McConnell said in the statement that while he collapsed, he didn't break any bones or otherwise injure himself. Still, he's been sent to a rehab facility, where the elderly can navigate a supervised recovery with physical, occupational and speech therapy. So, McConnell's doctors signed off on some form of further aid.

Spouse Elaine Chao was spotted leaving a rehab center while wearing a trench coat in Washington D.C.'s 98-degree heat. She also had a mask covering her, despite being outside.

It sparked a whole new round of conspiracy theories.

“This is more evidence that McConnell’s health is so poor they are making people around him mask up," ranted Loomer on social media.

“Why wasn’t she wearing a mask in the photo McConnell’s staff released the other day? Just more evidence it was an AI photo or an older photo," she added.

New York Magazine writer Jonah Shepp says President Donald Trump considers himself very intelligent — but that intelligence apparently didn’t extend to the definition of “quagmire.”

The U.S. and Iran are back at war again, less than a month after agreeing to a cease-fire deal and Trump’s frustration is visible.

“This is a very unpopular war that Trump reportedly thought would be over in days, then claimed would be over in four to six weeks, then insisted was actually over and fully won when anyone could tell that it wasn’t,” said Shepp. “Five months later, amid an alarming escalation, there’s still no end in sight. From everything Trump has said over the past few weeks, he’s apparently still under the impression that the war is under his control, the U.S. is winning and Iran is overwhelmed and desperate to negotiate, and the costs are not only bearable for Americans, but negligible.”

Worse, Trump’s original war goals, from the threat of a nuclear Iran to the Israeli regime-change scheme he bought into have come and gone, replaced by … nobody’s really sure. These days it’s about the state of the Strait of Hormuz—which Trump himself caused by unilaterally committing war on Iran.

“Welcome to a forever war, in other words,” said Shepp.

Trump dragged Iran and his own voters into war with “unclear, unrealistic objectives, lacking both an articulate theory of victory and an exit strategy,” said Shepp.

Projecting strength and avoiding the humiliation of defeat is tantamount to a guy like Trump, but the war’s unpopularity at home and abroad is putting the heat on Trump to cut and run—as if that would be possible without admitting defeat. Still, escalation doesn’t appear to be getting anywhere except in voters’ wallets.

“Passing over whether Trump is or is not the world-historic genius he perceives himself to be, he has yet to demonstrate a brilliant new strategy to prevent the Iran war from turning into an extended debacle,” said Shepp. “On the contrary, he disdains expertise and has put negotiations with Iran in the hands of two complete amateurs whom their Iranian counterparts don’t trust and whose only accomplishment so far has been a crappy deal for the U.S. that fell apart in weeks. Meanwhile, our armed forces are currently under the direction of a right-wing television personality and televangelist whose latest manosphere-inspired innovation is a policy to test U.S. soldiers for low testosterone.”

Worse, Shepp said that the U.S. diplomatic corps “has been hollowed out and politicized, Iran experts have been lost to budget cuts and ideological purges, and at this rate, Marco Rubio may soon be the only person left working at the State Department.”

“As Trump is now discovering, the U.S. didn’t get bogged down in past wars because his predecessors were ‘dumb,’ but rather because they suffered from historical, political, and ideological blind spots,” said Shepp.

While Americans are dealing with higher gas prices, high grocery prices and less healthcare, President Donald Trump is living his best life, says Jonathan Swan, co-author of the new book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, with fellow New York Times writer Maggie Haberman.

“[In his first term], there was always a feeling he felt under siege,” Swan told John Dickerson, host of Slate’s Political Gabfest podcast. “He was under investigation. He was reactive. He was surrounded by people who — whatever you think about Donald Trump, he’s not stupid when it comes to reading people — he understood that many of them had contempt for him and thought that he was dangerous and whatever. So I think it was just generally a stressful, unpleasant experience. This time around, he comes in with a sweeping immunity decision from the Supreme Court and with, especially last year, total command over his own party.”

Swan pointed out that never has he seen a president command his own party and force them to do things they don’t want to do like Trump did last year.

“We haven’t seen that before,” said Swan. “He’s richer than he’s ever been. His family’s making just inordinate sums of money from the presidency. He’s using power in the ways that he wants to without much pushback. He’s entirely surrounded by flatterers. He’s basically housebound. He doesn’t really travel around. He’s not really doing events. He goes from people flattering him in the Oval Office to people on the Mar-a-Lago patio.”

This, said Swan, leaves an extremely wealthy narcissist sitting very comfortably in his Mar-a-Lago home while the rest of America pays out an extra $600 on expenses due to Trump-induced inflation in the grocery stores and at the pump.

“He’s sitting there with his iPad playing Pavarotti and James Brown and having people come up to the table telling him he’s the greatest president ever, a world historic figure, all the rest of it. What’s not to like?” Swan told Dickerson. “He’s got a new jet from the Qataris. Now it’s never enough for Donald Trump, so I don’t think he’s in a state of constant bliss. He’s still frustrated and gets angry about stuff and whatever. But I think generally speaking, for someone who’s completely addicted to both power and attention, this is as close to a dose of pure crack as you can get. The highest purity crack that could possibly be on offer in the US system.”

But while Trump is getting richer many middle-class voters are not. American voters are facing a looming financial crisis as food and fuel prices continue to rise and wages remain stagnant. And they’re increasingly turning to high-interest-rate credit cards and payday loans with blazingly-high interest rates just to pay for family food.

This likely explains Trump's disastrous poll numbers in almost every dynamic, including sometime and occasional voters, Latinos and even working-class white voters, his prime base.

How many times has President Donald Trump blundered a path for peace. Let conservative Dispatch writer Kevin D. Williamson count the ways.

“Campaigning for the White House in 2024, retired game show host Donald Trump insisted that he would end the Russia-Ukraine war on his first day in office — maybe before. He repeated that boast more than 50 times — it clearly was not a one-off remark,” said Williamson. “[But] the war rages on, of course, and we have a pretty good idea of who is going to put a stop to that war: the Ukrainians.”

“How are the great peacemaker’s other projects going?” Williamson then asked before whacking Trump’s “ceasefire” in the U.S.-Iran-Israel-Lebanon-Hezbollah conflict.

It’s “a funny kind of ceasefire, in which the firing never ceases,” Williamson explained. “Those are the two big ones. Nothing you would call an unqualified success. We did wreck the Iranian navy, much of which might as well have been ordered from a 1972 Montgomery Ward catalog.”

Last year, Trump claimed he negotiated a ceasefire between India and Pakistan. But there were two parties who disputed Trump’s description, notably India and Pakistan. India, in fact, rejected the Trump administration’s offer to act as a mediator in the Kashmir dispute, Williamson reminded.

Trump also claims to have negotiated a truce in the Thai-Cambodian dispute, although neither the Thais nor the Cambodians seem to have got the word, said Williamson. Within a few weeks of the alleged ceasefire, a half million residents of the border area were forced to flee fighting and Thai flags were being raised on invaded territory.

Trump also brags that he negotiated a “historic” peace deal in the conflict in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. But fighting has, in fact, intensified since the “peace deal” got announced.

“In the months since Trump’s announced intention to intervene in the Egypt-Ethiopia dispute, there has been no fighting,” concedes Williamson. “Also, there was no fighting before, no war per se to be resolved. Trump did cause some head-scratching in the Arab world when he talked about his first encounter with Egyptian President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, who ‘was in a hotel, and I met him, and we fell deeply in love.’ A strange thing to say, but, then, Trump has for years been losing ground in what evidently is a hopeless war with his frontal lobe.”

Trump wants himself a Nobel Peace Prize, said Williamson. It’s shiny and Barack Obama got one that Williamson said he did not deserve, so why shouldn’t Trump?

“Unhappily for the president, the only peace prize he has secured for himself so far is the one invented for him by a corrupt soccer organization seeking to curry favor with his administration,” said Williamson.

Ronald Reagan wanted to be a peacemaker, said Williamson, but Reagan was a serious man surrounded by serious men.

“Donald Trump, in contrast, is a social media addict who watches cable news all day and is surrounded by sycophants, grifters, and incompetents,” said Williamson. “It is remarkable to note that even as the U.S. military has depleted its weapons reserves to dangerous levels, the priority for the strutting, preening secretary of defense is … testosterone screening for U.S. troops. It is as though these goofs wish to advertise their insecurities.”

“As a peacemaking team, the Trump administration has an almost unblemished record of failure. That being the case, they might wish to change the subject,” Williamson suggested. “Should we talk about inflation?”

PsyPost reports that casual disregard for reality poses a "uniquely potent threat" to public knowledge and belief.

People are more likely to believe false information when it comes from someone who ignores the truth altogether rather than a liar “who actively tries to deceive.” This is because repeating statements made by someone who is completely indifferent to facts “heavily increases how truthful those statements feel” to an audience.

Additionally, casual Trump-style disregard for reality appears to pose a deadly threat to community knowledge. According to researchers, the divide sits between a simple “liar,” — someone who knows the truth and intentionally tries to mislead an audience — and a “bulls——er,” who “communicates with little to no regard for the truth, evidence, or established facts.”

A statement made by a “bulls——er” might happen to be true, or it might be false, but the defining characteristic is the speaker’s absolute indifference to reality. Because they do not actively try to hide a specific truth, people often judge them less harshly than they judge outright liars.

In a 2023 study, Wake Forest University psychology professor and author John V. Petrocelli explored how untrustworthy sources influence consumer attitudes over time. Participants read an advertisement for a fictitious gluten-free pizza and then learned the advertiser was either a simple “liar” or “a known bulls——er.” Astoundingly, after a two-week delay, participants who had been “warned about the bulls——er” actually reported more positive attitudes toward the pizza than those warned about the liar. This, said Petrocelli, demonstrated a “sleeper effect,” where the deceptive influence of the “bulls——er” actually grew stronger over time. The researchers also found that people possess a higher “dismissal readiness” for lies, meaning they find it easier to entirely reject a known lie than a statement from the consummate liar.

“But the harder question … raised, and one almost nobody had tested empirically, was whether “bulls—— actually does more damage to what people believe, precisely because it doesn’t trigger the same skepticism a known lie does,” said Petrocelli.

The “illusory truth effect” is a psychological phenomenon where people tend to believe nonsense as true after hearing it multiple times. When the human brain encounters a repeated statement, it processes that information more easily, and people often mistake this mental ease for actual truth.

But Petrocelli wanted to see if knowing the source of a claim changes this effect. “If a person knows a statement comes from a bulls——er rather than a liar, they might not filter the repeated information as strictly,” he said.

Study participants were given 42 different statements. Half of them factual and half completely false. And it turned out that even after study participants were told whether the source of the info was a liar or a “bulls——er,” the exact same statements made by the “bulls——er,” was trusted significantly more than the liar. And in two other tests the repetition of the bulls—— claims successfully tricked their minds into believing the statements.

“A known liar’s claims get flagged and rejected; a bulls——er’s claims, because they’re not certainly false, slide by with much less resistance, and repetition alone makes them feel truer over time,” Petrocelli said.

“If anything, the practical takeaway is: don’t just ask ‘is this person lying to me,’ ask ‘does this person actually know or care whether this is true,’” said Petrocelli.

After days of speculation among election officials and experts about what President Donald Trump might say in a heavily hyped primetime speech on elections, Trump on Thursday night delivered a mix of familiar claims, grievances, and assertions about election security that stopped short of alleging that votes had been altered or that results had been changed.

This article was originally published by Votebeat, a nonprofit news organization covering local election administration and voting access.

Instead, Trump revived years-old evidence that China attempted to gather American voter data and that election systems are vulnerable to hacking, information that has long been public and that election officials said they have taken steps to mitigate. He also claimed to have identified 270,000 noncitizens on the voter rolls — election officials said they weren’t sure how that number was arrived at — and resurfaced old fraud allegations related to voter registration in Michigan.

In conjunction with Trump’s speech, his administration released newly declassified documents related to election integrity — some still heavily redacted — that in many cases did not fully back up the president’s claims.

“Every American deserves to know that when they cast their vote, that vote will be counted accurately,” Trump said, alleging that current election systems fall “catastrophically short of that standard.”

As he spoke, many secretaries of state from around the country were at dinner in South Dakota, closing out the summer meeting of the National Association of Secretaries of State. Many did not watch the address, convinced after years of Trump’s election-related allegations that he was unlikely to say anything he hadn’t said before — though many staff members attending the conference did watch, and some secretaries issued statements later.

Trump concluded the speech by again calling for passage of the SAVE America Act, his top legislative priority, which would impose photo ID and proof-of-citizenship requirements on voters nationwide.

“The kids playing wizard in the park have a firmer grip on reality than any of this,” one Republican staff member said as he entered Mount Rushmore.

NASS bussed conference participants to the monument on Thursday night, shortly after Trump’s speech concluded, as part of a preplanned event on a day when red, white, and blue was the recommended dress code. Secretaries and their staff filtered past state flags into five reserved rows of seats as “Yankee Doodle Dandy” played and the sun set.

Election officials, experts respond to Trump’s election speech

Not all secretaries of state were in South Dakota, and some did watch the speech. “I have seen zero new facts. I have seen zero evidence backing any of these claims,” said Arizona Secretary of State Adrian Fontes, a Democrat. “It appears to me to be a repackaged version of all of the stuff that we’ve known for years, and I was a little disappointed in the lack of new information.”

Election experts said the voting equipment vulnerabilities Trump appeared to be referring to in his speech have long been publicly known. “Everyone in this space knows that technology is vulnerable and works to put in safeguards and controls to secure it anyway,” said Geoff Hale, a visiting fellow for election security at the Center for Democracy & Technology, who previously worked for a decade at the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency.

Hale said he was still reviewing the documents released by the White House, but pointed out that nearly all Americans vote on systems that require a voter-verifiable paper ballot, to ensure a paper backup that can’t be hacked.

One declassified document, quoted by Trump in his speech, stated, “We judge that U.S. adversaries, including at a minimum Russia, China, Iran, and North Korea, as well as non-state groups, have the capability to compromise U.S. election infrastructure.” But Pam Smith, the president and CEO of Verified Voting, noted that some components of election infrastructure — such as public-facing election websites — are more vulnerable than others — such as voting machines. “There was a lot of conflation, it seemed to me, of different types of technology, the vast majority of which doesn’t actually affect election outcomes,” she said.

According to Trump, China also illicitly acquired the data of 220 million U.S. voters. However, voter data is widely publicly available, and it wasn’t clear from Trump’s speech whether he was alleging that voter registration databases were breached. Trump did allege that “members of the deep state” tried to downplay China’s acquisition of the data, “covering it up from both the president and the American people.”

Election officials from various states were quick to clarify that their data was secure. “I have no information, either from the federal government or anybody else, that Arizona’s voter information has been compromised,” Fontes told Votebeat.

The Chinese government didn’t steal any Wisconsin election data either, Wisconsin Elections Commission appointee Ann Jacobs, a Democrat, said on X. “If they bought our voter data, that is public data and they are allowed to buy it. So can you! So can anyone!”

Trump makes new claims about noncitizen voters

One new, or at least more specific, claim made by Trump in the speech is that there are 270,000 noncitizens registered to vote nationwide. According to a Department of Homeland Security memo released after the speech, that number appears to mostly be derived from a review of public voter files in four states: California, Nevada, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania.

Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar, a Democrat who heads the Democratic Association of Secretaries of State, said his office hasn’t heard from the Department of Homeland Security. “We don’t even understand how they calculated those numbers,” he said, adding that Trump “truly does not understand elections, not even at the basic level.”

Pennsylvania Secretary of the Commonwealth Al Schmidt, a Republican, said in a statement that the state follows all laws and requires voters to take steps to verify their identity before casting a ballot, adding that “all evidence has shown that noncitizen voting is extremely rare across the country, including in Pennsylvania.”

“We welcome DHS sharing their methodology and list of potential ineligible voters so we can carefully review the validity of their claims,” Schmidt said.

The president and his allies have long alleged that voting by noncitizens is widespread, but election officials, audits, investigations, and academic research have found it to be extremely rare, and noncitizens who vote illegally are subject to criminal penalties and deportation.

Multiple states have audited their voter rolls and found tiny numbers of noncitizens registered, most of whom have never cast a ballot. Nonetheless, the Trump administration has made the search for noncitizen voters a driving force behind its election agenda. Last year, the administration revamped a Department of Homeland Security data tool, Systematic Alien Verification for Entitlements, or SAVE, and encouraged states to use it to check their voter rolls for noncitizens.

States that did so reported finding relatively small numbers of potential noncitizens, and at least some of those flagged voters were later determined to be citizens, prompting many experts and election officials to warn that the SAVE program was unreliable.

For example, in Texas, officials flagged 2,724 potential noncitizens, some of whom county officials have determined are citizens, though it isn’t clear exactly how many. They’ve also found that hundreds of the flagged voters had registered through the Texas Department of Public Safety, which requires proof of citizenship, such as a passport, and keeps copies of such documents on file. In April, Texas Secretary of State Jane Nelson, a Republican, raised concerns about SAVE’s accuracy in a letter to federal officials.

In June, a federal judge blocked the overhaul of the SAVE program, saying it violated privacy and voting rights.

A Michigan case of suspected voter registration fraud

The president also spotlighted a six-year-old fraud allegation in Michigan as an example of election misconduct being “buried and covered up.”

Police reports showed that in the lead-up to the 2020 election, a woman working for a Tennessee-based company, GBI Strategies, submitted thousands of voter applications to the city clerk of Muskegon, a largely Democratic city. Most were legitimate, but the clerk identified irregularities with several hundred of them. The suspicious registrations were caught in time for the election.

The matter was initially investigated by Michigan State Police and Attorney General Dana Nessel’s office, but the investigation was turned over to the FBI in March 2021. The story made headlines at the time, but it was largely ignored on a broader scale until 2023, when a conservative news site amplified old reports about it, and it has been an occasional Republican talking point in the state since.

Nessel’s office said in a statement Thursday night that the incident provided a “perfect example of the system working exactly as it should,” meaning the clerk noticed suspected fraud and flagged it before anyone could vote improperly.

Jocelyn Benson, Michigan’s Democratic secretary of state who is now running for governor, emphasized in a statement after the speech that the state’s elections are “secure and safe.”

“This was the case in 2020, 2022, 2024 and will be again in 2026,” she said in a release. “Because in every election, over 1,600 bipartisan professional election administrators and thousands of trained poll workers ensure that the law is followed and that every valid vote counts.”

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President Donald Trump has it in his sights on the Smithsonian museums across Washington D.C. — and historians are fighting back.

Writing for The New York Times Friday, David W. Blight, the past president of the Organization of American Historians, penned a column blasting the White House for the edits it seeks to American history. The president's White House Domestic Policy Council published a report that claims the legendary Smithsonian aims to "erase" American "heritage." It claims that the museum curators are somehow political activists assaulting American history with anti-white bias.

"The report is not a document about history; it is the product of a racial and political ideology in search of a history that no longer bears scrutiny," said Blight. "People often joke about how Trumpism would like to return us to some version of the 1950s, when America supposedly was 'great.' In this report, the administration has done just that. The report would prefer that nothing had ever happened since the ’50s to mar the White House’s polished, superficial, puerile version of America’s past.:

Founded in 1846, James Smithson gave a gift to the American people to create an “increase and diffusion of knowledge." It is now the world's largest museum, with 21 different locations and a research complex, supported overwhelmingly by donations from the public, the website says.

Trump is taking aim at the national history museum. When founders lobbied to create a location for a "unique history book of objects," the goal was to “instill in each citizen a deepened faith in our country’s destiny as champion of individual dignity and enterprise.”

Some of the most popular items on display include the American flag that "was still there" when Francis Scott Key wrote the "Star Spangled Banner" during the War of 1812, and the gowns worn by first ladies at the inauguration. Famous chef Julia Child's full kitchen is on display. Dorothy's ruby slippers from "The Wizard of Oz" are there, as well as cars, trains and major objects from American democracy including Abraham Lincoln's top hat, Thomas Jefferson's portable writing desk and Susan B. Anthony's red shawl.

The Museum of American History boasts more than 1.7 million objects and 22,000 linear feet of archival documents, but Trump wants to change that. He wants a more "triumphalist history," Blight says.

The White House "cannot tolerate nuance, ambiguity, complexity. These elements of real history — dare we say truths about human experience — always spoil the party and the military flyovers. President Trump and his supporters have instincts for history, but far too little knowledge," he continues.

The column closes by calling on Americans to "hold the line" against "smiling propagandists."

"It is time, before it is too late, for Congress and the people to stand up to this attack on how we are to know and interpret our history. Defend the Smithsonian or lose it," says Blight.

Hunters and anglers in the western United States anticipated that President Donald Trump would shrink two Utah national monuments again during his second term. When that happened Monday, many of them wanted details of how millions of acres now outside the monuments’ bounds be managed, down to issues of weed control and wildfire prevention.

Instead, they’ve found themselves fact-checking Trump on the basics of his two orders slashing the size of Grand Staircase-Escalante and Bears Ears national monuments in southern Utah by about 90%.

Surrounded by Utah’s congressional delegation, Gov. Spencer Cox and Utah House Speaker Mike Schultz, Trump said Monday before signing the orders that in the monuments, “you can’t do anything. You can’t go hunting. You can’t go fishing. You can’t do anything. You can virtually not even walk on it.”

“That’s exactly right, sir,” Deputy Interior Secretary Kate MacGregor replied. “So you are remedying that today.”

In reality, hunting and fishing are both allowed in the two monuments, though the activities are banned in Utah’s five national parks, as spelled out in the state hunting guide. Hiking is permitted in all of them.

In response to Trump’s comments, the Montana-based nonprofit Backcountry Hunters & Anglers issued a call for “facts over politics” in the public lands debate.

“It fails the basic level of respect that we deserve as citizens of the United States. These are our public resources stewarded on our behalf,” said Ryan Callaghan, president and CEO of the nonprofit Backcountry Hunters & Anglers. “It’s not much to ask that our officials know what is entailed on those resources when they go and make a big decision like this.”

He said the “blatant misinformation” distracted from nuanced questions, including about how federal and state agencies would plan and protect wildlife habitat from the effects of higher road traffic and increased mining operations that Trump’s orders may bring.

Supporters of the president’s decision to downsize the monuments, including the governor and the state’s all-Republican congressional delegation, said it will improve public access while providing more targeted protection for valuable sites. They argued the original boundaries were too expansive.

Utah. Rep. Celeste Maloy praised the president Monday for “listening to the people of Utah and saying, ‘We know you value this land, you want it used for multiple use and not locked up.”

Callaghan said his organization, which counts roughly 35,000 dues-paying members, is nonpartisan. He told Utah News Dispatch he sees national monuments as another layer of protection for public lands as the Trump administration has sped up permitting for certain mining projects and moved toward ending a “roadless rule” limiting construction and timber harvests on national forest land.

Caleb Stroh, 43, of Kaysville, agreed. Stroh said he likes to hunt turkeys within the Bounds of Bears Ears National Monument in the spring, calling the environment “pristine and quiet.”

“When you start adding those other factors, like, you know, gas exploration or metal extraction, or … saying,’Well, we need a road right up this canyon, so everybody can access it in the sense of on a four-wheeler or whatever.’ Then those all those wonderful things that so many of us enjoy about hunting go right out the window,” Stroh said.

US President Donald Trump has used a rare nationwide prime-time address to again claim the 2020 presidential election was stolen, US voting machines cannot be trusted, and a “deep state” conspiracy has covered it all up.

In a speech that President Donald Trump advertised since the beginning of the week, and which was described as a "trap" to trick journalists that even many White House insiders reportedly opposed, the Republican leader ordered the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to pressure states to give him voter information.

"I've also ordered DHS to notify every state about non-citizens on their voter rolls and direct them to revoke all ineligible voters' registrations immediately," Trump said. From there, he pivoted to connecting his Homeland Security order to his signature voter suppression bill.

"But most importantly, election security demands that Congress pass the SAVE Act." Trump said. "How easy is that to do — unless you want to cheat? The only reason you wouldn't do it is you want to cheat, because your policies are so bad and your candidates are so pathetic. that you can't get elected any other way. This landmark bill requires that all voters must show photo voter ID."

In response to Trump's rhetoric about using DHS to intimidate state officials to provide voter rolls, the anti-Trump Republican group known as the The Lincoln Project wrote that "Donald Trump is declaring war on America's election officials."

Meanwhile conservative commentator Sam Stein wrote, regarding Trump's accusation that China tried to turn the election against him, that "one of the documents that Trump has disclosed tonight has a section noting that China targeted the BIDEN campaign and does "not currently intend to covertly interfere to try and sway the outcome of the election."

Dan Vicuña, the Senior Policy Director for Voting and Fair Representation at Common Cause, told AlterNet last month that Trump is trying to delegitimize the 2026 midterm elections after anticipating they will turn against him.

“What they all add up to is a desire to avoid any accountability to the voters in the midterm elections — to ensure, to preordain the outcome of a midterm that he thinks is going to go badly for him,” Vicuña told AlterNet.

Trump's 2020 election conspiracy theories emerged immediately after the November 2020 presidential election, when Donald Trump refused to accept his loss to Joe Biden. Rather than conceding defeat, Trump embarked on an unprecedented campaign to delegitimize the election results, falsely claiming the election was "stolen" through widespread fraud—claims that were rejected by election officials, courts, and his own administration.

Trump's central claim was that mail-in voting, which surged due to COVID-19 pandemic precautions, enabled massive fraud. He alleged that ballots were fabricated, voting machines were rigged, and election officials in Democratic-led cities had conspired to inflate Biden's vote totals. These allegations had no factual basis. Election security officials called the 2020 election "the most secure in American history," and Trump's own Attorney General William Barr found no evidence of widespread fraud.

Despite dozens of lawsuits challenging election results being dismissed by courts—including by judges Trump himself appointed—Trump continued pushing the narrative. He pressured state officials to "find" votes, most notably in a recorded call asking Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger to overturn the results. Trump also encouraged supporters to march on Washington on January 6, 2021, which culminated in a violent riot at the Capitol as Congress attempted to certify the election results.

Throughout 2021 and beyond, Trump maintained the "Big Lie," using it to raise hundreds of millions of dollars from supporters and establishing himself as the leader of a movement centered on the false claim that the election was stolen. The conspiracy theories inspired continued protests, lawsuits, and legislative efforts to restrict voting access, leaving a lasting impact on American politics and public trust in elections.

Four months out from the critical November midterms, President Donald Trump delivered a primetime address on Thursday night attempting to sow doubt about the integrity of US elections, repeating well-worn lies about the 2020 contest that he lost and claiming to have uncovered a sprawling Chinese plot to meddle in the voting process.

Trump, who has said his administration should “take over” US elections that are currently run by states, asserted in his speech that the American voting system was “left vulnerable to being rigged and stolen” by his political enemies and accused China of “illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files” in an effort to undermine him. Trump’s speech coincided with the declassification of intelligence purportedly revealing China’s “sinister” scheme to disrupt US elections as well as attempts by “members of the Deep State” to “suppress and downplay” the scheme.

Experts and critics of the president said his speech cherrypicked intelligence agency findings to concoct a false, self-serving narrative about the vulnerability of US elections and the need for legislation such as the SAVE America Act, a voter suppression bill that Trump has obsessively worked to push through Congress.

Rep. Raja Krishnamoorthi (D-Ill.), a senior member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, said in a statement that Trump “selectively declassified intelligence to try to rewrite the history of an election he lost.”

“Even his own document release does not support his claim that the 2020 election was stolen. It confirms what we’ve long known: Foreign adversaries targeted our democracy, but there is no evidence they changed a single vote or altered the casting or counting of ballots,” said Krishnamoorthi. “President Trump lost the 2020 election fair and square. If he cared about election security, he wouldn’t be putting unqualified political loyalists in charge of our intelligence agencies or weakening the agencies responsible for protecting our elections from foreign threats.”

“Instead,” Krishnamoorthi added, “he’s reviving conspiracy theories about mail voting, pushing voter suppression, and laying the groundwork for an unprecedented federal takeover of our elections—all while ignoring the real challenges facing American families.”

During his speech, Trump lashed out at major TV news networks for declining to broadcast his speech live and in full, accusing media outlets of being “part of the plot” and calling for the “revocation” of NBC and ABC’s broadcast licenses.

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.) called Trump’s threat “insane.”

“At a time when millions of Americans are finding it harder to pay for groceries, housing, and healthcare, when the climate crisis is causing record heatwaves and forest fires, Donald Trump felt it appropriate tonight to spew conspiracy theories about the 2020 election,” said Sanders. “Pathetically, in true authoritarian fashion, he even threatened to revoke the licenses of ABC and NBC because they would not cover his speech.”

“All of us, regardless of our political views, must stand together against this dangerous president who is seeking to undermine our Constitution and our basic freedoms,” Sanders added.

“Trump is laying the groundwork to dismantle our elections, overturn results he does not like, cancel the will of the people, and hold onto power by any means necessary.”

Trump’s address cited “raw intelligence” that he said shows an attempt by China “to manufacture illegal ballots” for former President Joe Biden. The president claimed, without evidence, that the intelligence was maliciously “buried by rogue bureaucrats.”

But, as The Washington Post observed, “raw intelligence reports are often wrong, incomplete, or contradictory, and spy agencies rely on judgments by expert analysts to vet and piece together the information to make conclusions with different levels of confidence.”

“Officials in 2020 disagreed about whether China wanted Trump to lose and about whether Beijing took any steps to undermine him—a controversy noted in a declassified 2021 report. That report described consensus on the conclusion that neither China nor any other foreign actors had tampered with any votes,” the Post noted. “The hundreds of pages of documents released online by the White House during Trump’s speech did not appear to support Trump’s contention that China interfered in the 2020 election to try to defeat him or that US intelligence officials deliberately hid information about Beijing’s intentions from him.”

Robert Weissman, co-president of the advocacy group Public Citizen, characterized Trump’s speech as an attempt to divert public attention from his administration’s “catastrophic policy failures and plummeting approval ratings.”

“Trump is waging an illegal, unconstitutional, and utterly pointless war that continues to put American and Iranian lives in jeopardy and drive up gas prices. Corporations are setting prices out of reach for people being paid too little,” said Weissman. “Trump rammed through tax cuts for the rich, paid for by cutting healthcare and food assistance for millions and millions of people. An out-of-control paramilitary force is kidnapping people off our streets and killing them at shocking rates. Trump’s delusional rantings tonight are a transparent effort to distract from these realities.”

Living United for Change in Arizona, a pro-democracy organization, warned that “Trump is trying to end our democracy in front of our very eyes.”

“Tonight Donald Trump stood before the nation and attempted to rewrite history, erase the will of the voters, and prepare the country for his next assault on American democracy,” the group said. “We must call this what it is. Donald Trump is laying the groundwork to dismantle our elections, overturn results he does not like, cancel the will of the people, and hold onto power by any means necessary.”

The futuristic sci-fi game Warhammer 40,000 depicts a battle between authoritarians and their opponents in a dystopian future. Historian Christian Ruth, in the conservative website The Bulwark, describes Warhammer 40,000 as "bombastic and intentionally, deeply satirical." But according to Ruth, MAGA Republicans are taking the game's biting satire of fascism and twisting it into a pro-Donald Trump meme.

"40k's deep ambiguity makes it a compelling setting for gaming — but it also offers the online right a perfect set of tools for prosecuting its own irony-poisoned meme crusade," Ruth explains in The Bulwark. "What exactly do they want to express when they depict Trump as the God-Emperor of Mankind? If you have to ask, they might joke, the Inquisition could show up on your doorstep."

Warhammer 40,000 debuted long before the MAGA movement. Released in 1987 — the year Trump's "The Art of the Deal" came out — by the British company Games Workshop, Warhammer 40,000 (which many gamers and sci-fi fans call "Warhammer 40K") was a sequel to the battle game Warhammer. When Warhammer 40,000 came out, Ronald Reagan was president of the United States, Margaret Thatcher was prime minister in the UK, the Soviet Union still existed, and Madonna was burning up the Billboard charts.

But Warhammer 40,000 is still popular after 39 years, and according to Ruth, MAGA Republicans are well aware of it.

"Many of 40K's foundational themes deliberately evoked the political and socioeconomic tumult of the 1980s and the late Cold War as (Prime Minister) Margaret Thatcher restructured the British economy along neoliberal lines," Ruth notes. "Some of the earliest editions of both the original Warhammer and 40K made their contemporaneous satire explicit. One of the mightiest and bloodthirstiest and most human-hating Orks in the 40K universe is called Mag Uruk Thraka, for goodness' sake. In 40K, whole worlds are destroyed by a casual 'Exterminatus' order that cauterizes threats to the Imperium with nuclear fire. The real-world English industrial town Birmingham, degraded by Thatcher's policies in our timeline, became the name for a dark, backwards industrial planet in 40k's distant future; it receives so few visitors that 'its inhabitants have become linguistically and culturally isolated.'"

Ruth continues, "The punk rock and the counterculture movements of the 1970s and 1980s were a major influence on the art of Warhammer and have remained a constant undercurrent for its unique hyper-gothic medieval futurism. All of which is to say, Warhammer has always been political."

MAGA Republicans, according to Ruth, are twisting Warhammer imagery when they rail against "wokehammer."

"One right-wing Warhammer YouTuber, 'Arch Warhammer,' has notably made joint videos with far-right fitness guru 'the Golden One' Marcus Follin in which the two lament the decline of western culture in their respective media spheres," Ruth observes. "Elements of far-right politics in both the United States and the United Kingdom have surged in Warhammer communities. Some fans feel that their hobby has come under unwelcome external scrutiny and even attack, and seek to preserve it against alleged cultural interlopers by upholding what they see as the old ways."

President Donald Trump’s former Homeland Security chief of staff, Miles Taylor, is mocking the Republican’s current press secretary for a gaffe that arguably symbolizes the administration’s larger seeming ineptitude.

Reflecting on how Karoline Leavitt said that what Trump reveals tonight "will shock you if you have an honest eye listening to the president,” Miles Taylor quipped that “yes, and if your ears watch closely, you'll be doubly stunned.”

This is not Leavitt’s first faux pas. Earlier this month, while speaking with Fox News journalist Jesse Watters, the 27-year-old — who achieved her wealth by marrying a New Hampshire real estate developer who is 32 years older than her — expressed scorn for members of Generation Z that she claimed have turned to left-wing politics because they are supposedly entitled.

“My generation — I hate to say it, Gen Z and those younger than me —have been raised with just silver spoons in their mouths, just getting everything handed to them,” Leavitt told Watters. She described Generation Z as being fueled by “laziness and the liberal indoctrination” and suggested that they be sent to fight Trump’s war against Iran and threatened war against Cuba.

Similarly, Leavitt was heavily criticized last year for justifying the administration’s revisions of jobs data so as to imply that the American economy was performing better than was actually the case.

“The jobs data has had massive revisions,” Leavitt said during a press conference. “We want to ensure that all of the data ... coming out of the BLS is trustworthy and is accurate, which is why the president has restored new leadership at the BLS [Bureau of Labor Statistics].”

This reporter has also interacted with Leavitt while she made inaccurate or stylistically questionable statements. When asked about evidence that Trump’s ongoing Iran war is failing, Leavitt told AlterNet in May that he had in fact succeeded.

“President Trump’s courageous decision to launch Operation Epic Fury is grounded in a truth that presidents for nearly 50 years have been talking about, but no president had the courage to confront: Iran poses a direct and imminent threat to the United States of America and our troops in the Middle East,” Leavitt said in a statement. “The rogue Iranian Regime under the evil hand of the Ayatollah has killed and maimed thousands of American citizens and soldiers over the years – and that ends with President Trump.”

Similarly, speaking to this journalist shortly after the second assassination attempt against Trump in 2024, Leavitt complained that a historian with whom he spoke compared Trump’s ongoing violent rhetoric and vilification of leaders who disagree with him to the actions of Nazi leader Adolf Hitler.

“It's been less [than] 72 hours since the second assassination attempt on President Trump's life and the media is already back to comparing President Trump to Hitler,” Leavitt told this reporter. “It's disgusting. This is why Americans have zero trust in the liberal mainstream media."

The real message to be drawn from Trump’s address to the nation last night is that he will call into question the votes of every state and city that chooses a Democratic senator or representative in the 2026 midterm elections. He’ll push Republican governors and mayors not to certify the results. He’ll demand recounts and audits.

We’ve been here before, but this time he’s even less restrained than he was in 2020 and is surrounded by people who will do his bidding.

His address tonight was absurd. It was riddled with so many lies that I’m reluctant to dignify them with rebuttals, but you should have them.

He mentioned a newly-declassified investigation into a voter registration group in Muskegon, Mich. that apparently had invited fraudulent registrations in 2020 — but Trump didn’t mention that the applications had been caught and none of them had resulted in any ballots being sent out incorrectly. The F.B.I. closed the investigation, stating “the investigation to date did not identify a criminal violation or a priority threat to national security.”

He alleged, once again, that foreign powers have hijacked votes, or that federal or state officials plotted to rig either the 2020 election. But no evidence has ever emerged showing that vote counts have been manipulated or corrupted. Intelligence reports, state audits of vote tallies and lawsuits have repeatedly affirmed official results in 2020 and other years. Nothing suggests China manipulated votes. Instead, U.S. intelligence assessment says China “probably also continued longstanding efforts” to gather information on U.S. voters and public opinion and to use that information to influence U.S. policy “as it has during all election cycles since at least 2008.”

The most significant foreign influence operations occurred in the 2016 presidential election and were conducted by Russia, in favor of Trump, according to the Mueller report. To the extent that this and other reports appeared to cast doubt on the legitimacy of Trump’s victory, they have had the effect of fueling his distrust of U.S. intelligence agencies.

Despite his repeated assertions that U.S. elections are not secure, Trump during his second term has significantly cut the budget of the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, including its election work. That’s because Trump grew contemptuous of the agency, and the government’s election security work generally, after it validated the integrity of the 2020 election.

So the entire performance was fake — an extension of his Big Lie that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him.

It was also a commercial for the “Save America Act,” which would make it harder for many American citizens to vote. Voters would have to prove their citizenship in person upon registering to vote, with documents such as an enhanced form of REAL ID (a state ID card compliant with federal regulations) that indicates American citizenship; a birth certificate; a passport or military identification card.

An estimated 9 percent of eligible voters, or 21.3 million Americans, either do not have documents that prove their citizenship, such as passports and birth certificates, or cannot retrieve them in a day or less, according a study by the Center for Democracy and Civic Engagement at University of Maryland and the Brennan Center for Justice. And 45 states do not issue the kind of enhanced driver’s license indicating citizenship status that would be needed to verify voting eligibility.

The point is that American democracy is acutely endangered by a sociopath who will stop at nothing to get the results he wants.

This means that you and I and every other patriotic American have to do whatever we can to ensure free and fair elections, and fight Trump’s torrent of lies and authoritarian moves.

If you’re anything like me, you’re warn out by Trump. You’d like nothing better than to tune him out. I get it. But American democracy is seriously on the line here. We must keep up — and accelerate — the fight.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

President Donald Trump’s former White House communications director just explained that the White House teleprompter operator accused of betting on the president’s speeches made one big tactical mistake — he thought MAGA would back up someone who is not rich.

“I think the problem with what's happening with the teleprompter guy — he probably heard the president say that he was going to pardon everybody inside 200 to 250 feet of the White House, as reported in ‘Regime Change’ by Jonathan Swan and Maggie Haberman,” Anthony Scaramucci told MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace on Thursday. “But he doesn't qualify, the poor kid, because he doesn't make enough money. He's not influential enough, and his last name isn't Trump. So the kid's obviously in a lot of trouble, and he's going to pay the price while the president's going to go on to make several billion dollars for himself.”

When it comes to Trump’s history of insider trading while in office, Scaramucci argued that the president does not care about the ethical issues involved. In fact, he believes he is clever.

“He sees it as incredibly smart: ‘Look how smart I am. The other people that held his position, they couldn't do this. Look how great I am,’” Scaramucci said. “While Barack Obama had a seven- or eight-page financial disclosure, he had a phone book of 927 pages. And, oh, by the way — you pointed this out — he thinks it's peanuts compared to what the tech blogs make, etc. He also thinks a lot of the stuff that he's doing is legal.”

Scaramucci added, “And if you look through the financial disclosure, where he was actually breaking the disclosure law, he's paying the $200 requisite fine. So he's laughing his way to the bank. His attitude is, ‘You know, this is what all presidents should have been doing. Look how smart I am.’”

The allegation is that Gabriel Perez, who has operated Trump’s teleprompter since the 2016 election. Now, according to ABC News, used inside knowledge of what Trump would say in his speech to win more than $100,000 on Kalshi wagers. Davis Ingle, a Trump White House spokesperson, told the reporters investigating for ABC News that "the staffer in question is fully cooperating with the CFTC,” or the Commodity Futures Trading Commission.

Despite Perez being seemingly held accountable, Scaramucci has pointed out that Trump and his high-level aides have allegedly engaged in insider trading without consequences.

“Answer these questions: Are you allowed to insider trade in Congress?” Scaramucci posted on X earlier this month. “Can the president do his so-called businessman’s deals? Is any of this actually legal?”

He continued, “My opinion is: It smells terrible and it should be stopped. But we’ve lost our sense of shame. Trump said 2 things: 1. It’s peanuts and not that much money. 2. Nobody cares. That second one is the one that should keep you up at night.”

Scaramucci finished by saying, “Hopefully people actually do care. Hopefully they show up in November and send these guys a message.”

Speaking with this author for Salon in 2018, Scaramucci argued that Trump’s appeal was based on voters who struggle economically believing his populist message and hoping that he would help them.

“What I saw was in a generation we went from aspirational working class families, like the one I grew up in, to [desperate] working class families,” Scaramucci said. “What I saw is a decline in wages causing some level of economic asphyxiation for a very large group of people. And so Trump being out there, going into those areas, explaining the policies that he’s going to put in place, and then executing on some of those policies. I mean it’s not me saying, it’s just go look at ‘The Wall Street Journal.’”

https://youtu.be/eIofaZfIe4E

President Donald Trump’s policies and public relations approach are in large part shaped by a journalist who has long had a reputation for being unreliable.

“Solomon’s decades-old reputation for letting down his audience is starting to reach conservatives,” wrote The Bulwark’s Will Sommer on Thursday, referring to right-wing influencer John Solomon. “Popular conspiracy theory blog Conservative Treehouse has grown skeptical of Solomon’s promises, even adding a bolded warning label of sorts to a preview of Trump’s Thursday speech so readers wouldn’t get too excited.”

Sommer quoted a popular conspiracy theory blog, Conservative Treehouse, which warned readers about Solomon by saying “caution should be noted as newly appointed Special Government Employee John Solomon is responsible for the content.”

Similarly an anchor from MyPillow founder and right-wing conspiracy theorist Mike Lindell’s channel, Emerald Robinson, expressed skepticism about Solomon’s record.

“LOL why would anybody trust John Solomon based on his record?” Robinson posted on the social media platform X.

Sommer noted wryly, “When you’ve lost Lindell’s crew…”

In advance of Trump’s speech, Sommer cited reporting that indicated Solomon was likely a major influence on Trump’s rhetoric and approach.

“Whatever Trump does, it’ll be because of John Solomon—a star conservative reporter who is, somehow, also a White House staffer,” Sommer wrote. “For nearly a decade, Solomon has had a hand in the creation of nearly every major MAGA grievance narrative, from the Russia investigation to Ukraine to 2020 election fraud.”

He added, “Solomon has a pretty clear M.O.: He’ll spin a story that seems like a massive exposé, getting it trumpeted on Fox News and throughout the right-wing media ecosystem before it has a chance to deflate under scrutiny, as it usually does.”

While working on a short-term basis for the Trump White House, Sommer described Solomon as a man who tries to help Trump find information about the president’s perceived political enemies and his upcoming attempt to delegitimize the 2026 midterm elections.

“Yet this narrative impresario and his brand of quasi-journalism remain largely unknown outside the world of right-wing media,” said Sommer who covers MAGA-related news in addition to other topics for Bulwark. “In 2007, when Solomon was an investigative reporter at the Washington Post, the Columbia Journalism Review was already complaining that his stories amounted to the ‘John Solomon special’: front-page revelations that, when scrutinized, turned out to be little more than a ‘steady stream of mediocrity.’”

Sommer wrote, “Now, thanks to his role in the Trump administration, Solomon has a chance to work that magic on a much larger scale.”

Among Solomon’s various controversies, last year he hosted a phone interview with Trump in which he agreed as the president spread misinformation about the investigation into his ties with Russia, his coup attempt after losing the 2020 election and his baseless allegations of Chinese interference in American elections. Back in 2019, he spread debunked conspiracy theories that Ukraine had interfered in the 2016 election, coming under heavy criticism from the company which published those pieces, The Hill, which promptly investigated all of his work on Ukraine.

Then-Rep. Devin Nunes (R-CA), a staunch Trump supporter, ran interference for Solomon at the time.

“‘The Hill’ told its staff yesterday that it would conduct a review of Solomon’s Ukraine reporting — and this is just three days after a Democrat on this committee told a Hill writer that she would stop speaking to The Hill because it had run Solomon’s stories,” Nunes said. “And she urged the writer to relay her concerns to The Hill’s management. So now that Solomon’s reporting is a problem for the Democrats, it is a problem for the media as well!”

President Donald Trump famously refused to support raising the minimum wage while campaigning at McDonald’s in 2024, rescinded a federal order raising the minimum wage for federal contractors during his second term and picked a Treasury Secretary (Scott Bessent) who staunchly opposed raising it despite being worth hundreds of millions himself.

Now some Democrats are arguing that a focus on the minimum wage could be the key to defeating Republicans in the 2026 midterm elections.

“Democrats have set their sights on federal minimum wage laws to beef up the party’s platform ahead of the 2028 presidential elections,” wrote NOTUS reporter Jade Lozada on Thursday. “Just not everyone in the party agrees it needs to be a pillar of how Democrats address affordability.”

Lozada reviewed the different stances taken by prominent Democrats and Democrat-adjacent politicians on this issue. Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) wants to gradually raise the minimum wage to $25 per hour by 2039, while Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) proposed a bill that would raise it to $17 per hour by 2030. Three other top Democrat lawmakers — Sen. Chris Von Hollen (D-MD), Sen. Mark Kelly (D-AZ) and Sen. Cory Booker (D-NJ) — have expressed support for raising the minimum wage without giving specifics.

“Murphy’s bill would require large corporations to pay minimum-wage workers $12 per hour immediately after enactment, with gradual increases up to $25 per hour five years later,” Lozada wrote. “Other employers would have 12 years to reach that wage.”

He added, “The proposal would set the minimum wage thereafter to two-thirds of the national median hourly wage. In contrast, Sanders’ proposal would increase the minimum wage by the annual percentage increase in the country’s median hourly wage.”

In contrast to these Democrats, at least one prominent centrist Democrat has expressed skepticism that working class voters are really focused on that issue.

“Most people in Michigan wouldn’t work for the current minimum wage in the state of Michigan, right?” Sen. Elissa Slotkin (D-MI) said when asked about her position. “Like they’re being paid more, and they’re still not able to afford their life.”

She later added, “It’s just, to me, not the top thing that I hear from people, or even in the top 10 that I hear from people.”

Additionally, Lozada noted that there are moderate voices in the party that have expressed reservations about the economic viability of raising the minimum wage.

"Murphy’s $25-per-hour proposal — the companion to a bill from progressive Reps. Delia Ramirez of Illinois and Ro Khanna of California — has faced criticism from some economists and others in conservative and libertarian circles who say such a high minimum wage could lead to layoffs, reduced hours, poor working conditions and low hiring rates as employers look to cut costs,” Lozada reported.

We get an update on elections and voting rights in the United States from Mother Jones's national voting rights correspondent, Ari Berman, who warns of President Donald Trump's escalating attempts to “try to claim dictatorial power” and commit an “unprecedented intervention” into the 2026 midterm elections. Whether it takes the form of claims of foreign interference, canceling mail-in voting or requiring proof of citizenship, “[t]he bottom line here is they keep lying about the 2020 election so that they can justify massive interference in the 2026 election,” says Berman. “That’s something that we all need to be very vigilant about.”

This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.

AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org. I’m Amy Goodman, with Juan González.

President Trump’s Department of Justice continues to investigate the 2020 election results in Fulton County, Georgia, a state President Trump repeatedly falsely claims he won in 2020. Now CBS News is reporting the FBI fired two of its officials after they voiced concerns over the probe, claiming it was politically motivated. Their firings come months after the FBI raided an election office in Georgia’s Fulton County, seizing computers and ballots related to the 2020 election. Last week, a federal judge in Atlanta quashed a DOJ subpoena seeking the names and personal information of Fulton County’s 2020 election workers.

Meanwhile, President Trump has forced out the last remaining members of the Election Assistance Commission, a bipartisan, independent agency tasked with certifying voting systems and helping local election officials. The White House fired the Democratic commissioners, Thomas Hicks and Benjamin Hovland. And a third commissioner, Republican Christy McCormick, was given the chance to resign, which she did. The committee’s remaining member, Republican Donald Palmer, stepped down in April to join the Heritage Foundation. Trump’s dismantling of the Election Assistance Commission comes less than four months before midterm elections, following last month’s Supreme Court ruling granting the president more power to fire members of independent agencies.

For more on all of this, or as much as we can do in the next few minutes, we’re joined by Ari Berman, the national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones.

Thanks so much for being with us, Ari. Start off by talking about the judge quashing the request for information of Fulton County election workers, and then going on to the primetime address President Trump is expected to give on Thursday night.

ARI BERMAN: Hi, Amy. Well, thank you for having me back on the show.

So, what happened in Fulton County, Georgia, was the Justice Department was trying to get access to the personal information of thousands of election workers from the 2020 election, and the judge said, “You can’t have that personal information. And also, you can’t bring charges against them, because it’s too late.” It’s been now six years since that election.

But the disturbing thing here is that Georgia is just a microcosm of what they’re planning to do to interfere in the midterms. The raid on Fulton County, Georgia, the taking of 700 boxes of ballots, that is a preview of the type of suppression and intimidation the Trump administration wants to do everywhere in 2026. And we’re seeing this with the primetime address the president is planning to give. He’s going to lie and say there was rampant fraud and foreign interference in the 2020 election, so that he can then say we have to seize voting machines, we have to stop mail voting, we have to do all the things that he tried to do in 2020 but was unsuccessful.

And the bottom line here is they keep lying about the 2020 election so that they can justify massive interference in the 2026 election. It really is that simple. You put all the different moves of the administration together, that is the underlying goal, to build a narrative that will justify some kind of unprecedented intervention in the midterms to challenge how people vote, how votes are counted and how elections are certified.

JUAN GONZÁLEZ: Now, Ari, you’ve been covering election news for years now. You’re one of the top experts in the country on it. Have we ever seen any attempt by a federal government to actually squash free and fair elections like we’re seeing now? And to what degree do you fear that Trump could be successful?

ARI BERMAN: No, Juan, I think it’s completely unprecedented, what the Trump administration is trying to do. We’ve never seen the full weight of the federal government mobilized in such a way to try and interfere in free and fair elections and to try to undermine elections in so many different ways, from how people vote to how elections are administered to how elections are ultimately certified here.

Now, I do think the problem that the president has is that the Constitution is very clear that states, with oversight from Congress, run their elections, and the president has very little role in doing that. And so, time and time again, what Trump wants to do is blocked in court. His executive orders have been blocked in court. So much of what the Justice Department has tried to do has been blocked in court. So, that’s the silver lining of this, is that, yes, the president is becoming more authoritarian, more desperate, but that doesn’t mean he’s going to be any more successful in trying to do this. He can say the 2020 election is rigged. He can say that he wants to seize voting machines or stop mail voting, but, ultimately, states have the power to run their elections. And that’s the saving grace of our constitutional system right now to stand up to what Trump is doing.

AMY GOODMAN: What he’s going to say on Thursday night, what you understand?

ARI BERMAN: Well, what I understand is he’s going to allege foreign interference in the 2020 election, which has been extensively studied. There was no evidence of interference in that election. If there was any interference, it was Russia trying to help Trump. But there was no evidence that Iran or Venezuela or China or the other countries that Trump is going to name interfered in that election.

But he’s going to say they interfered, so that he can create the predicate for then interfering in the midterms to say, “I can now have the power to seize voting machines. I have the power to shut down mail voting. I can try to put in place proof of citizenship to register to vote.” He can’t unilaterally do any of those things, but he’s going to try to claim dictatorial power for himself, through the propaganda that his administration is generating, to try to lay the predicate for some kind of dramatic intervention of the midterms. And that’s something that we all need to be very vigilant about.

AMY GOODMAN: And threatening to arrest election officials if any noncitizens vote? We have 20 seconds.

ARI BERMAN: Well, it’s just an example of further weaponization of the Justice Department, from trying to uphold the laws to trying to intimidate election workers into following Trump’s agenda. And I think election workers are going to stand up to it. But, again, it sets a very chilling precedent.

AMY GOODMAN: We want to thank you, Ari Berman, for joining us, national voting rights correspondent for Mother Jones.