Trump Team’s Scramble to Kill His Primetime Flop Revealed

President Donald Trump’s aides tried and failed to stop him from raging about his thoroughly debunked claims of election rigging in front of the whole world last week.

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The president, 80, delivered a televised speech from the White House on Thursday night to warn that “great damage” has been done to the integrity of U.S. elections by nefarious foreign powers, leaving the nation’s polls “vulnerable to being rigged and stolen” and costing “the trust of the American people.”

Trump, who still contends he won against Joe Biden in 2020, has done more to undermine confidence in elections than any other president in U.S. history. Much of the information in the documents was readily available to him during his first term. The dump covers a range of threats already known to the public and fails to substantiate his claims that U.S. polls could be either “rigged” or “stolen.”

The Washington Post now reports that the president had actually wanted to deliver his “very big” news much earlier, in June. His aides “managed to put it off” while pushing to have Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt announce the dump once she returned to work at the end of the month. The hope was “to avoid a primetime address,” but “ultimately, Trump got his way.”

The president delivered what he portrayed as bombshell revelations during a 26-minute speech aired in full on Fox News. The network, which in 2023 was forced to pay out almost $800 million for backing Trump’s election denials despite its staff privately admitting he was wrong, has since been conspicuously eager not to discuss his new claims in any depth.

Other networks have since fact-checked away any credibility behind Trump’s insistence that the results of U.S. elections, such as those in November’s crucial midterms, could be fixed by means of “hacking, exploitation, and foreign interference.” The president has responded by calling for the revocation of ABC and NBC’s broadcast licenses for refusing to televise his speech in full.

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The Post reports that Trump has privately reveled in how his address snagged “great reviews” and a “big audience.” The mood among Republican Party ranks has, according to the newspaper, pointed in precisely the opposite direction.

“Many Republicans facing voters this fall have shown little interest in making Trump’s renewed focus on the 2020 election central to their campaigns as they head into a midterm complicated by the president’s weak standing with independent voters,” the Post writes.

The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.

Take Michael Whatley, a former chair of the Republican National Committee who has backed the president’s claims of election rigging in the past and is now running as the GOP’s Trump-endorsed Senate candidate in North Carolina. He spoke for 34 minutes about public safety at a campaign event on Friday, the morning after the president’s primetime address, and did not mention Trump’s claims once.

“We’re going to talk about the economy and what I’m going to do to make sure everybody makes more and keeps more. We’re going to talk about our military and our national security,” Whatley told supporters. “But the number one issue that we want to talk about in this election cycle, that we need to talk about in this election cycle, is keeping our kids and communities safe.”

Even stalwart pro-Trumpers like the president’s disgraced former adviser Steve Bannon and conservative activist Laura Loomer have largely shrugged in the wake of the data dump. Bannon has suggested that the president needs to take a more aggressive approach to shore up election security ahead of November, while Loomer has openly questioned whether any of the information shared Thursday is actually new.