Trump’s Rambling Prime-Time Address and a Week of Corruption Stories

Donald Trump’s much-hyped Thursday night prime-time address—billed as “the most important presidential address since the Cuban Missile Crisis” by Ohio Senator Bernie Moreno—turned out to be an unintelligible, recycled collection of election conspiracy theories that even the hosts of Pod Save America struggled to follow. Only Fox and CBS carried it live, and CBS cut away after about half the speech. The substance, such as it was, fell far short of the buildup.

Trump claimed he was declassifying “critical intelligence” about election vulnerabilities. But the documents posted to WhiteHouse.gov didn’t match his rhetoric. The core allegations: that China acquired 220 million U.S. voter files in 2020 (voter registration data is public and available to anyone, including every campaign); that voting machines are vulnerable (no evidence any vote was changed, and the intelligence community has said as much); that a Michigan voter registration fraud incident went unprosecuted (it was flagged, no votes were changed, and similar fraud happens in registration drives, not at the ballot box); and that non-citizens registered to vote but didn’t actually vote. The biggest head-scratcher: Trump spent time alleging that Nicolas Maduro meddled in Venezuela’s elections, somehow included in a speech ostensibly about U.S. electio