President Donald Trump’s underwhelming Thursday-night address was immediately undercut by experts who fact-checked his claims.
In his speech, the president repeated claims that the 2020 election had been stolen, that electronic voting machines were insecure and had been compromised by foreign actors, and that China acquired 220 million U.S. voter files, among other accusations.
Ben Ginsberg, a Republican election lawyer, told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins immediately following the speech that, despite the president’s claims and references to declassified documents uploaded online, there was still no evidence of any effect on an election result.
“What stood out to me is that there’s still no evidence of a result of any election being incorrect,” Ginsberg told Collins.
“There still was not the documents, there still was not the evidence, although we’ll see what’s produced,” Ginsberg said, before responding to a number of specific claims Trump made.
The 74-year-old, who has worked for the RNC, George Bush’s presidential campaign and the Republican Governors Association, also discussed the president’s claims about Chinese interference in the 2020 election.
“The administration has cut back on the cybersecurity agency, CISA, and the Department of Justice outfit that helps states so that, in fact, if there is a problem with the 2026 election, it will be in large part because the defenses that are provided by the federal government to the states to stop that activity have been drastically cut back,” he said.
Others fact-checked the president’s claims online, including former national security expert Miles Taylor, who served as the Chief of Staff of the Department of Homeland Security during Trump’s first term before making waves for questioning his fitness for office and campaigning against his re-election.
“Trump suggested the ‘Deep State’ hid from him that China was trying to interfere in our elections… maybe he forgot that we personally briefed him on the threat throughout 2018,” Taylor wrote on X.
“Big mistake to make claims living humans can refute.”
Taylor also broadcast a livestream offering a real-time fact-check of the president’s claims, telling his viewers, “If he wants to thank anyone for protecting the elections during his administration, he can thank folks like me… we’re not going to let him get away with these lies about the 2020 election.”
In addition, CNN’s Zachary Cohen noted that the documents published by the White House discussed issues that were already widely known.
“The documents Trump is referring to right now, and CNN has reviewed all of them, largely discuss vulnerabilities that have been known for years and/or are reflected in the 2021 US intel community assessment,” Cohen wrote.
“None of the declassified information supports the claim that any previous election results — including the 2020 presidential contest that Trump lost — were manipulated by foreign interference or fraud in a way that would’ve changed the outcome.”
CNN’s Laura Coates Live featured a segment calling out Trump’s claims with senior CNN reporter Marshall Cohen, who noted that voter files like the ones supposedly accessed by China can be bought online, that the CIA found Venezuela did not have the capability to interfere with foreign elections, and that the source of the president’s claim about 250,000 non-citizens being found on voting rolls was unreliable.
“When you look at the better source, the government sources that assess who’s a citizen, who’s not, it was a much smaller number, only about 28,000,” Cohen explained.
The Bulwark’s Sam Stein also fact-checked the president’s claims, highlighting evidence in the documents published by the White House that contradicts Trump’s assertions that election interference was primarily conducted to disadvantage his campaign.
“one of the documents that Trump has disclosed tonight has a section noting that China targeted the BIDEN campaign and does ‘not currently intend to covertly interfere to try and sway the outcome of the election,’” Stein wrote, attaching a screenshot from one of the declassified documents uploaded to the White House website.
Even Fox News trod lightly in its coverage of the president’s speech, devoting just over five minutes to the address before pivoting back to the subject of Iran.
Discussing the speech with Sean Hannity, White House correspondent Aishah Hasnie said of alleged evidence that electronic voting machines are easily compromised, “Fox News has not seen the evidence yet and is not in a position to evaluate the accuracy of the president’s statement and claims.”
Fox News was sued for defamation in 2021 by Dominion Voting Systems after several programs across the network amplified claims that the company’s machines had been rigged to steal the 2020 election from Donald Trump. The case was settled in 2023, and Fox agreed to pay Dominion $787.5 million and acknowledged the court’s ruling that it had broadcast false statements.
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
