Quick Note Ahead of Trump’s Address on Thursday
He’s priming the field
Trump is going to tell you Georgia’s Senate seats were stolen and he is going to use this as a basis to try to cancel the midterms.
Here are the facts:
He has already floated canceling the midterms twice this year. In January he told Reuters, talking about the midterms and the seats Republicans could lose, “we shouldn’t even have an election.” He said something similar to a room full of House Republicans.
The White House said he was joking. When a reporter asked whether the President finds canceling elections funny, the press secretary asked him if he had been in the room.
He can’t cancel them. No president can. The dates are set by statute and the elections are run by thousands of local officials in every state. Even the Republican former recorder of Maricopa County says the idea misunderstands how elections actually work.
Here’s what he’s doing instead: sowing distrust in elections so much that they can try to call off the elections.
Georgia Public Broadcasting went and counted. In the 1,387 precincts Trump won in November 2020, about 310,000 fewer people voted in the January runoffs. Ossoff won by 55,000. Warnock by 94,000. The dropoff in Trump’s own precincts was more than double both margins combined.
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution went through the voting records and found 752,000 Georgians who cast a ballot in November and never came back in January. More than half were white. Many were rural. The steepest drops came in Marjorie Taylor Greene’s district and Buddy Carter’s.
Their poll found that more than three quarters of Georgia Republicans believed there had been widespread fraud. Four percent of Democrats did.
They found one of the men who stayed home. Craig Roland, 61, of Rome, Georgia. He told them he didn’t believe his vote would count. “What good would it have done to vote?” He said he doesn’t know if he’ll ever vote again.
He didn’t lose those seats to fraud. He talked his own voters out of voting, and Craig Roland is still not voting.
Here is what he did about it.
January 5, 9:03 in the morning. Kurt Olsen, who has spent years denying the 2020 election and now works in the White House, formally refers Fulton County to the Justice Department.
January 5, 8:36 that night. The same day. DOJ files to dismiss the civil lawsuit it had been using to try to obtain Fulton County’s ballots.
January 28. FBI agents carry nearly 700 boxes out of the Fulton County elections warehouse. The original ballots. The tabulator tapes.
The ballot images. Georgia’s 2020 voter rolls. Legal experts told CNN the case moved unusually fast for its kind.
That timeline is not mine. It is the Justice Department’s own, filed in court after a federal judge ordered them to produce it. Fulton County told the judge what they believe it was: a pretext to get records this administration could not secure through the civil process.
The chairman of the county commission said he was never told where the ballots went, and that he can no longer assure anyone they are secure.
The Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was at the warehouse in person. At a county ballot depot in Union City, Georgia.
His own Justice Department, in his first term, found no evidence of fraud that could have changed 2020.
On Thursday he is expected to announce newly declassified intelligence reports that, in MS NOW’s careful wording, the White House says reveal foreign plans to interfere in the 2020 election. Read that phrasing again. Nobody is reporting that the documents show it. They are reporting that the White House says they do.
The Director of National Intelligence is the person who declassifies intelligence.
He told the New York Times that he always respects the results of elections, and then that the elections in this country are rigged. The election that has not happened yet is in November. By then the agency that certifies America’s voting machines will still have zero members and still be unable to act. The Justice Department will still be holding Georgia’s ballots.
He is not investigating the last election. He is building the case against the next one.
Georgia is not the exception. It's the model.
His DOJ is suing two dozen states for their voter rolls. Courts have repeatedly ruled these demands illegal.
It sent monitors into six states. Five have Democratic governors. Detroit's clerk says the monitors DOJ cited in its own letter were never there.
It sent letters to all fifty states threatening election officials with criminal prosecution.
One state’s ballots. Twenty-four states’ voter rolls. Fifty states’ officials. The machines themselves.
And last week he fired both Democratic commissioners of the Election Assistance Commission by email.
The Republican had already quit. The agency that certifies America’s voting machines has zero members and cannot act.
Raphael Warnock, one of the two senators Trump is about to call illegitimate, already told you what it's for: he is rigging the rules ahead of the midterms.
And the logic doesn't make sense:
Warnock has won 2 primaries, 2 generals, and 2 run offs.
Ossoff had to win a primary, a general, and a runoff.
Every piece of that was in place before a single vote is cast in November.
Thursday isn’t about 2020. It’s about 2026.