President Donald Trump no longer treats the people who defeated him as voters. He treats them as suspects.
In a primetime address, Trump described the U. S.
election system as “so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.” Factcheckers agreed he proved nothing.
Trump assembled old intelligence, vulnerabilities and lies into a conspiracy: 220 million U. S.
voter records in Chinese hands, “extremely exposed” voting machines, 278,000 supposed noncitizens on the rolls and a deep-state burial of proof.
Yet some documents he released contradicted him.
A 2021 intelligence-community assessment found no indication that any foreign actor attempted to interfere with registration, ballot casting, tabulation or results.
A newly released document judged tabulation systems difficult to manipulate at election-changing scale.
Fulton County as a laboratory
Trump’s speech named Michigan but omitted Georgia.
In January, FBI agents seized roughly 700 boxes of 2020 election materials from Fulton County, including about 150,000 mail ballots, 116,000 cast for Biden.
The bureau redirected 260 analysts nationwide to work on an investigation into that year’s election.
One day before Trump’s speech, ProPublica reported that the FBI had explored using artificial intelligence to re-examine ballot-envelope signatures.
The allegations behind the seizure had been found false; Georgia’s ballots were counted three times, once by hand.
Yet an FBI source told ProPublica the hunt would continue “whether they find anything or not.”
Fulton County was no random choice. Georgia is where Black opposition to Trump became governing power.
Black voters made up about 29% of the 2020 electorate; nearly nine in 10 supported Biden.
Fulton gave Biden an advantage approaching 243,000 votes in a state he won by 11,779.
Trump carried Georgia in 2024. That victory did not end his pursuit of Fulton.
National architecture
Trump’s justice department has lost its first 15 district-court attempts to obtain states’ unredacted voter rolls. Having failed in court, he propagandized on television.
The day before the speech, House Republicans attached Trump’s Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, or Save America Act, to a state department spending bill and passed it, 217–209.
The bill would impose new identification requirements on mail voting, require documentary proof of citizenship to register and compel every state to send its complete federal voter list to the Department of Homeland Security within 30 days.
Trump ordered DHS to direct states to remove alleged noncitizens.
On Friday, DHS Secretary Markwayne Mullin claimed that a database had identified more than 250,000 potential noncitizens registered in California, New Jersey, Nevada and Pennsylvania.
His department offered no evidence.
The database can misidentify naturalized citizens; last month, a federal judge blocked the revamped system from checking voter rolls, finding it less accurate and a threat to privacy and voting rights.
Trump can neither erase his loss nor the Black political power essential to it. So he no longer treats the people who defeated him as voters.
He treats them as suspects. To this president, any election he loses is a crime scene.
