Washington: Donald Trump’s allies and fellow election conspiracy theorists did not miss a beat in the aftermath of his prime-time address alleging election meddling, fraud, and a cover-up by the country’s own intelligence community.
MAGA stalwart Steve Bannon texted me shortly afterwards: “The damning evidence unearthed … from the ‘deep state’ intelligence agencies sets the predicate for President Trump to declare a national security emergency regarding this November’s elections.
“Immediate action needs to be taken to implement the provisions of the Save America Act.”
To be fair, Bannon and his ilk have been talking about this for a while. On his radio program earlier in the day, he and fellow conservative broadcaster Wayne Allyn Root made the case for a national security emergency that Root said could only be assailed by a two-thirds vote in Congress.
“This is how Trump destroys them, and this is how we win the midterms. This is the holy grail, it’s foolproof, they can’t stop it,” Root said.
“I don’t think he’ll declare it tonight, but he’ll lay out the case tonight … and little by little, by the end of August, by the beginning of September, he’ll declare the national security emergency.”
Bannon agreed. “This is the start of a process … This is kind of the opening kick-off,” he said, and foreshadowed more revelations by the US president in the days and weeks ahead.
These are not the ravings of people on the internet who are separated from the corridors of power. These are people with deep connections to those now running the government in Trump’s new-look administration.
Many key officeholders are recent appointments in an acting capacity. Bill Pulte, the acting director of national intelligence (who was in the room for Trump’s address), replaced Tulsi Gabbard only a month ago. He is a private equity guy entirely loyal to Trump, and was explicitly tasked by the president to investigate “rigged elections”. Indeed, Trump said he only expected Pulte to be in the role temporarily.
Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal lawyer, is serving in an acting capacity as attorney-general. In that role, he will oversee the investigations Trump has just commissioned into allegations of fraud, corruption and a “deep state” cover-up. Trump is urging the Senate to quickly confirm Blanche in the role.
Blanche made a telling slip in his confirmation hearing this week. Asked whether he was friends with Trump, Blanche replied: “I’m his lawyer – was his lawyer.”
Not only that, but Trump has temporarily employed a conservative journalist and conspiracy theorist, John Solomon, to lead the White House task force that is investigating these claims. Solomon, founder of right-wing site Just the News, is best known for trying to undermine the investigation into possible ties between the Trump campaign and Russia in the 2016 election.
Solomon was also in the room for Trump’s address. Later, while departing the White House, he admitted to television network MS NOW that the US intelligence community had found “zero evidence that a foreign power flipped the vote in 2020, 2022 or 2024”.
But the reality is this: the Trump White House is packed with fresh, loyal appointees in crucial national security roles who are in some cases explicitly there to undertake a short-term operation of exposing so-called evidence of corruption in US elections and sowing doubt about the integrity of the upcoming midterms.
The point of Thursday night’s prime-time address was not the specific content of Trump’s claims. Notice, indeed, that he did not announce any consequences or retribution for China, the country that had supposedly stolen 220 million voters’ data and worked to undermine his presidency.
Rather, it was to paint a picture of a corrupted system – “worse than any Third World country”, in Trump’s words – that was almost beyond salvation. Trump says the solution is the SAVE Act, but we certainly can’t be sure its passage would satiate him.
Ty Cobb, a White House attorney during Trump 1.0, said before the president’s speech that he believed its purpose was to create a predicate to declare an emergency at or before the midterms. Dispatching ICE agents or the National Guard to polling stations was a virtual certainty, he said.
“I think you will see him doing everything he can to try to prevent the peaceful transfer of power, the election of Democrats, and do whatever he can to remain in power and keep his cronies in power,” Cobb told PBS News.
This is serious now. Americans go to the polls in just over three months.
Trump, who will face the same investigations and impeachment attempts as he did in his first term if the Democrats seize control of Congress, has every incentive to prevent that from happening.
We’ve now seen just how far he is willing to go.
More from Michael Koziol
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Michael Koziol is the North America correspondent for The Age and Sydney Morning Herald. He is a former Sydney editor, Sun-Herald deputy editor and a federal political reporter in Canberra.Connect via X or email.From our partners
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