Donald Trump promised “really big news” in his primetime address on election integrity on Thursday night but failed to deliver any.

Instead, he recited a laundry list of disinformation and misinformation but provided no evidence votes were changed or voting systems manipulated in the election he lost six years ago.

Election experts called it “shockingly thin,” “underwhelming,” and “something less than a nothingburger.”

But that doesn’t mean the threat that Trump poses to fair elections has gone away. In fact, the speech makes it more likely that the president will ultimately take drastic action to interfere in the 2026 midterms.

Notably, the declassification of intelligence alleging that China interfered in the 2020 election, despite the fact that a 2021 review by the US National Intelligence Council found that “China did not deploy interference efforts,” is the first step in an outlandish plot by far-right election deniers to get Trump to declare a national emergency so that he can attempt to seize control of the voting system.

“Tonight’s speech is intended to add the predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections,” former White House attorney Ty Cobb told PBS prior to the speech.

Trump stopped short of doing that, for now. But he’s clearly laying the groundwork to claim those unprecedented emergency powers at some later date, possibly closer to the election, as Cobb suggests.

For the past year-and-a-half, anti-voting activists have lobbied the president to sign a 17-page executive order that would completely upend how Americans vote and have their ballots counted in an outlandish attempt to usurp powers that the Constitution explicitly gives to states and Congress. They’ve been relentlessly pushing false or inflated claims that China interfered in the 2020 election, which Trump fully embraced on Thursday, to justify the so-called national emergency.

Trump’s “speech is intended to add the predicate that he needs to declare an emergency at or about the time of the elections,” said former White House lawyer Ty Cobb.

As I reported in March, the draft order dubiously alleges that an emergency declaration would allow Trump to unilaterally outlaw mail-in voting for most Americans and seize voting machines in favor of a hand count of all ballots, which would take much longer and be far more........

© Mother Jones