U.S. President Donald Trump speaks in the East Room of the White House in Washington on Thursday.Saul Loeb/The Associated Press
He threatened a toll for ships going through the Strait of Hormuz. Then he offered safe transit for Gulf state countries that invested in the United States. He reopened hostilities against Iran. He vowed to “take out” the underground nuclear-weapons site at Iran’s Pickaxe Mountain.
Then a wartime president declared war against the election system and the government of his own country that he has headed for nearly six of the past 10 years and that twice sent him to the White House.
The dizzying parade of developments this week alone – events, charges, decisions, changes in direction, mixed messages – set in motion by Donald Trump roiled waters across the globe and, especially, in the United States itself. It culminated in an attack against the “Deep State” – a term familiar primarily to his MAGA supporters, who believe in an entrenched conspiracy of leftists, bureaucrats, guardians of the status quo, and the media.
The United States has had wartime presidents before; one reliable estimate puts the U.S. at war in 93 percent of the calendar years since its independence 250 years ago. Wartime presidents customarily seek to rally the country behind them and the combat they threaten, initiate, or are forced to join. They have sought unity, at times with high moral purpose (Franklin Delano Roosevelt, entering the Second World War in 1941) and in periods of division seeking future, or restored unity (Abraham Lincoln at the opening of the Civil War, 1861). In all cases, they always have asserted the sanctity of American institutions.
Mr. Trump, who prides himself on being an outsider, has taken a different direction.
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His election-manipulation jeremiad consisted of warmed-over, in many cases over-interpreted, claims of election manipulation that critics swiftly dismissed as old news, even as fake news.
While deficiencies in election integrity have been a hardy perennial in American politics since the beginning of the country’s history – 19th-century accounts brim over with reports of efforts to influence elections, mostly with bribes or booze – there’s scant evidence that any of it has altered the results. One exception: Lyndon Johnson’s 1948 Democratic Senate primary victory, by a mere 87 votes, in Texas. (Historians generally agree that, while there were irregularities in Texas and Illinois, they were not sufficient to swing the 1960 election from John F. Kennedy to Richard Nixon.)
Indeed, what emerges in the broad sweep of American history is that breaches in election integrity, including those in the 2020 election that Trump lost to Joe Biden, generally have affected the margins rather than the outcomes of political contests. An Associated Press study of election-fraud charges in 2020 battleground states found a mere 475 documented examples, far fewer than the amount required to alter the result of the election. Moreover, a National Intelligence Council report found “no indications that any foreign actor attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process in the 2020 U.S. elections, including voter registration, casting ballots, vote tabulation, or reporting results.”
Only a quarter of Americans, but half of Republicans, believe the 2020 presidential election whose result Mr. Trump has challenged, was rigged, according to a YouGov survey taken a month ago.
It actually likely is true that massive campaign-finance efforts undertaken by domestic interests, often allied with business groups, have manipulated elections with more efficiency and greater effect than have China or Russia, whose efforts were well known and reliably documented long before the President’s Thursday night address.
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One conclusion, nearly irresistible and in a way confirmed by the President’s assertions, is that he and his party are facing the likelihood of a wave of dissension against the Iran war and the economic disruption it has caused policies, placing them in danger of losing control of the House of Representatives and, if that wave gathers force, of the Senate as well.
The result, much feared in the White House: Newly empowered Democrats would have control of congressional committees, armed with subpoena power, that are capable of undertaking searing investigations of the President – and would be eager to do so.
By raising questions about the outcome of the 2020 presidential election, Mr. Trump implicitly is raising questions about such an outcome in 2026 midterm congressional elections. These contests are being conducted amid deep disapproval of Mr. Trump (61 percent, according to this week’s Washington Post/Ipsos Poll) and profound worries about the economy (43 percent, according to the poll, believe they are “not as well off” as they were when Mr. Trump took office a year and a half ago).
Mr. Trump focused much attention on voting machines even though one of the documents that the White House made available asserted that “vote tabulation systems would be difficult to manipulate on a wide enough scale to compromise election results.”
But Mr. Trump proactively questions the very same systems that will operate during the November election – “not so much as prelude to a rigged election,” as the Cornell political scientist David Alexander Bateman put it shortly after the Trump speech, “but as laying the foundation for him insisting that it was rigged against him.”