Monday Morning Politics: Trump's 'Nothingburger' Speech on Elections

**Brian Lehrer** (0:10)
It's The Brian Lehrer Show on WNYC. Good morning, everyone. So, which blew more smoke across the United States last week? The Canadian wildfires, or President Trump's Thursday night speech about election security?
Perhaps the biggest takeaway from the speech, according to many election and political analysts, seems to be that he still doesn't have evidence of China or anyone else preventing or flipping any votes in his loss to Joe Biden in 2020, and he didn't actually claim that they did. He could only go as far as this in this 22nd clip.

**SPEAKER_3** (0:48)
Over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People's Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China's illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files.

**Brian Lehrer** (1:10)
And reportedly, that voter information came largely from publicly available lists that anyone could access.
But no, he didn't even claim that China actually changed who won any state in 2020 or even that they tried. So, why are the people who really care about free and fair elections and about trust in elections still worried? Well, because they fear Trump might use the smoke from Thursday night's speech, thin as it is compared to the wildfires, to declare some kind of state of emergency as the midterm elections get closer to suppress many Americans' votes. Ari Berman has the goods on what that state of emergency might include if the president dares to go there and also the politics that might encourage him or possibly prevent him from trying. Ari Berman does this for a living. He is Mother Jones' voting rights correspondent. Yes, they have a voting rights correspondent, if you didn't know.
He is the author of Give Us the Ballot, The Modern Struggle for Voting Rights in America, published in 2016, and Minority Rule, The Right-Wing Attack on the Will of the People and the Fight to Resist It, released in 2024 His new article in Mother Jones after the speech is called Trump's Primetime Speech Was a Dud, He Could Still Use It to Interfere in the Midterms. Ari, thanks for coming on for this. Welcome back to WNYC.

**Ari Berman** (2:31)
Hey Brian, great to talk to you again. Thank you.

**Brian Lehrer** (2:34)
And we'll get to the He Could Still Interfere in the Midterms part, but on the speech was a dud part. Was the China clip I played a good example of the limits of what he could claim?

**Ari Berman** (2:45)
Exactly. That was a great clip because it basically showed that they had no new evidence. They claimed, Trump claimed that he was going to announce really big news, and there was very little news in the speech. The intelligence documents that were ultimately declassified didn't show much and to the extent that they showed anything, it was things that were taken out of context by the president. Basically what happened in 2020 was a bunch of countries were thinking about how can we try to influence the US presidential election that included Russia, China, Iran, a few others.
Basically, not a lot happened. To the extent that there was any interference, it probably came from Russia helping Trump. But in terms of China, they basically bought some publicly available information, use it to study the American election system, and ultimately decided they weren't going to try to interfere in the election. It would be very, very difficult to do so. The reason why President Trump didn't say that votes were going to change is because votes weren't changed. You couldn't make that claim. And it would also be very, very difficult for any kind of foreign entity to actually be able to change votes. That is something that because the system is so decentralized, because voting machines in particular are offline, it would be very difficult to do the kind of whole scale interference in the election by a foreign entity that President Trump was claiming was possible.

**Brian Lehrer** (4:20)
Right. And Trump invited people to go to WhiteHouse.gov and look at the documents that he was declassifying. So I went to the Wall Street Journal's article on those documents after they looked at them. I figured Rupert Murdoch's Wall Street Journal would be happy to say Trump was right about anything, but would also be fair in saying if he wasn't. And basically they cited how the documents debunked rather than supported Trump's claims in the speech.
For example, on China, the journal concludes, quote, the newly released documents don't provide evidence that Chinese actors access states voter registration systems. Instead, they suggest the data was largely valuable for political analysis and for informing future intelligence or influence efforts. Now, I'm going to keep going here, Ari and everybody, give me a minute, but I think you'll find this valuable. On the possibility that electronic voting systems, you know how Trump is always trying to go after these electronic voting systems, he got sued by one of them, or Fox News got sued by one of them for some of the reporting on that a few years ago. So on the possibility that electronic voting systems could have been hacked and votes changed, the journal included an excerpt from the Trump release document. Again, this is what Trump wanted everybody to go to whitehouse.gov and look at. The journal did and they read this.