U.S. President Donald Trump aboard Marine One in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, U.S., July 15, 2026. REUTERS/Kylie Cooper
This Thursday night, July 16 at 9 PM eastern time, U.S. President Donald Trump plans to give a prime-time speech that he says will include "really big news" on "free and fair elections." Nervous GOP insiders, according to Politico, wish he would stick to the economy and not talk about the 2020 election. And according to the Daily Beast's Michael Daly, some former FBI and intel officials fear that Trump's speech will "be part of an attack on democracy itself."
Daly, in the Beast, reports, "Trump has announced a 9 p.m. Thursday speech, demanding TV network air time — which they have yet to promise — on what he claims will be a matter of national importance. But to those who have worked at the pinnacle of law enforcement, something else is afoot."
Trump continues to claim that the United States' 2020 presidential election was stolen from him — an allegation that was debunked by countless vote recounts. And the former FBI and intel officials interviewed by the Beast are greeting Trump's Thursday night speech with a lot of trepidation.
A retired FBI official, interviewed on condition of anonymity, told the Beast, "If I was still working a terrorism investigation and a network started coming together and getting into key positions and they started gathering the information and the materials that they needed to carry out a plot, those are things we would call 'warnings and indicators'…. He intends to control what happens in November and…. he's put the pieces in place to allow him to do that."
The ex-FBI official noted that agent Paul Brown was removed from the FBI's Atlanta office after he expressed reservations about the Trump-era's U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) current investigation of the 2020 election.
The agent lamented, "He wouldn't go along with it, so they pushed him out."
A former U.S. Office of National Intelligence official, also interviewed on condition of anonymity, told the Beast that Trump "believes that (if) the Republicans lose" the U.S. House of Representatives in November, "he will be impeached." Trump is the only president in U.S. history who won a second term despite having been impeached twice.
The former FBI official warns that one should never underestimate what Trump is capable of doing with the 2026 midterms.
That interviewee told the Daily Beast, "The rest of their administration is frozen. They get nothing done. No more of their agenda, nothing…. What does a cornered rat do? Anything is possible."
