CNN's First Reactions to Trump's Primetime Election Speech

The president has just concluded his speech tonight that is focused on U.S. elections and what they say is attempts at foreign interference in U.S. elections. As the president also brought up conspiracy theories about the recent California primary, theories that are unfounded. And I should note that unlike the claims he made about the 2020 elections, he has also offered no, like I should say, the claims he's made about the 2020 elections, he offered no documents to back up what he said about what happened in California. As evidence of fraud has been buried, hundreds of thousands of non-citizens and dead people are listed and active on the voter rolls, and yet we still have elections with no voter ID, no proof of citizenship, and tens of millions of ballots floating aimlessly through the mail. As one example of the insanity, California's recent election for mayor of LA and governor was held on June 2nd, a long time ago, but it was just completed a few days ago on July 10th. Think of that, much more than one month, took a month to count the votes. I wonder what they were doing. This is worse than any third world country. There's no third world country that has elections like we have. That's because officials would say that U.S. elections are a lot stronger than third world country elections. And it's important to note, as you were listening to the president and his arguments tonight, that really all of this is in the context of the president trying to push the Save America Act, as he calls it, the SAVE Act, as it's known, on Capitol Hill. Right now, it cannot pass on Capitol Hill because it doesn't have enough Republican votes in the Senate. And John Thune, who is the leader of Senate Republicans, has made clear they are not willing to get rid of the filibuster and don't have the votes to do so in order to lower the threshold of how many votes it needs to get passed. The president's entire argument tonight, as he was building up with these newly declassified documents from his officials, was about the SAVE Act in and of itself. Yet still, it's not clear and unlikely that that's going to change the minds of Senate Republicans. My colleague John King has been watching this speech. And, John, obviously, this is something the president has been pushing for with increasing fervor as we get closer to the midterms. What was your takeaway from tonight? A lot of ominous tone from the president, ominous words from the president. It sounded more like a spy novel. A familiar complaint to you, Caitlin, about the deep state. The most striking thing the president did was he focused mostly on China. And he said he was releasing all of these new documents tonight that were going to prove more things about China, he says, trying to get voter roll information, trying to learn about how to pry into voting machines and voting systems. He never directly connected any of that to changing an election result. That's important. I don't have the documents in front of me. We'll see if they get you there. But the president never did. The only time the president said anything about nefarious action actually changing an election was, he said, there are documents here showing how China helped the Maduro regime in Venezuela in 2020 change votes to stay in power. That is the only specific claim of actually rigging or changing an election result the president made. Much of it was, again, China's trying to do this. Russia did a little bit of that. But again, focused mostly on China about things we've known about, things that have been in past intelligence reports about China. Yes, trying to get information about U.S. voters. Yes, trying to test the vulnerabilities of U.S. election systems. But nowhere did the president in that speech connect it to they changed the result in this state or they changed the result in this precinct. There was no connecting the dots to that point in the speech. I don't have the documents in front of me. Our team is looking at that that way. But the tone of it was overwhelming. What was most striking to me, Caitlin, you covered the Trump White House at the time, was he had a boogeyman and it was the familiar deep state. The president saying that this was all kept from him, kept from John Ratcliffe, his then director of national intelligence, kept from Gina Haspel, his then CIA director. Marco Rubio, who's now the secretary of state, was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the time. He has access to just about everything in U.S. intelligence. But Trump was making the point that people working for him, maybe they came from they were there in prior administrations, were keeping this information away from him about what he alleges is a deeper, more nefarious Chinese plot than we have ever known about. Look, the proof will be in the documents. But again, the president never connected the dots in any way to saying and they did this in Georgia, for example, or they did this in Arizona, for example. He talked about a Democratic voter registration group in Michigan that he said as if this was a horrible, horrible thing. They were giving out gift cards to people if they registered more voters as if there was some nefarious nature to that. So a lot of it was greatest hits. There were some new allegations about China having maybe a more aggressive role than we've known about in the past. But again, nothing from the president where you can say Party X did this, changed an election here in a way that changed the outcome. I did not hear one word of that. I heard a lot of ominous. And again, he says he wants the Congress to pass the SAVE Act. I've spoken to a number of experts today who think foreign meddling is a problem. The United States should do more about it. They don't see much in the SAVE Act that does anything about that. They think it's all about Trump's voter I.D. push. John, as someone who covered the White House, have you ever seen a primetime address or heard a primetime address like this one? No. No. Again, again, if the president has new information about foreign meddling, foreign meddling is a big deal in our elections, has been for quite a long time, has been quite a long time. It's gotten caught up to a very polarized debate because of the Mueller investigation, because of after 2016. It is impossible now in the Donald Trump era to have an adult conversation about a very legitimate issue. It'd be nice if Democrats and Republicans could get together, as the president said at one point. Why can't we do this on a bipartisan basis? Well, he's the reason they can't do some of it on a bipartisan basis, because he keeps telling Democrats they're crooks and they stole elections. But no, at the ominous tone of it, you know, presidents speak to the nation when wars start. Presidents speak to the nations after tragedies. Presidents do speak to the nation to ask for big policy priorities. But we're 15 and a half weeks from an election in which, you know, the numbers, the president's approval ratings in the 30s, his party's in deep trouble. This is not the issue they think is going to save them in November. John King, thank you for, as always, watching with us. And I should note, as we were listening to what the president said tonight, here's another quote from him during this speech. Finally, to reveal just how vulnerable our elections continue to be, we are releasing the results of a stunning investigation by the Department of Homeland Security. According to the DHS review, state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections. Since Democrat states refused to share their voter files, the real number is actually much higher than that. Yet even this limited analysis found more than a quarter of a million foreigners illegally registered to vote. Evan Perez, you're also following the speech. Is any of that true? Well, it is based. There is a report from the DHS, and it is based on an analysis that was done drawing from private sector data. The problem is, as the president has pointed out, that some of the states, of course, that manage this data have refused to turn over their voter rolls to the DHS and to the government, to the federal government. And that includes some Republican states, by some Republican run states who have also refused to do this. And so it is true that there is some data out there, but it is not reliable. This is private sector data. The government data would obviously be a lot more effective. And also the other issue here is that the number of people who may be noncitizens, who may be on these rolls, does not indicate that any of them have actually voted, right? I mean, we've seen analysis after analysis of this. It is a very tiny problem. I think the Heritage Foundation did an analysis of this from 2002 to 2022, and they found about 100 instances of this. So the president is pointing out to something that is an issue, but it is not the issue that he is making it out to be.