For six long years, Donald Trump has regularly alleged that the 2020 presidential election was stolen from him, despite the thorough debunking of his and his allies’ claims by federal and state governments and the courts. Now the 47th president has put the entire prestige of the United States, and its law enforcement and intelligence agencies, behind the audacious assertion of a vast conspiracy to corrupt that election and cover up innumerable acts of treason. In an unusual “Address to the Nation” on Thursday night, Trump announced a series of “revelations” about election security that will thrill the most credulous of conspiracy theorists with their scope and the bottomless depravity they purport to expose.

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Despite the vast scope of the criminal network he alleged, Trump offered no specific evidence of actual votes being stolen, fabricated or counted, as election law maven Rick Hasen noted:

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What Trump did NOT do was even purport to show a single ineligible voter voted in the 2020 election, or that any voting machines were actually compromised, voting machines or voter registration databases breached, or election results inaccurately reported.

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And even the headline claims about China were quickly exploded:

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Sen. Mark Warner, D-Va., ranking member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, called Trump’s “shocking ‘bombshells” about China “totally bogus.”

“The fact is our intelligence agencies unanimously agreed that China did not even try to change a single vote in the 2020 election,” Warner wrote.

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It was all smoke and no fire but that could be all it takes to make well-intentioned people doubt their votes will be fairly tabulated.

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Now it’s clear why Republicans were “scared shitless,” as one Capitol Hill source told Politico, about this speech. When his party desperately needed him to make concrete proposals for improvements in living costs and credibly promise an end to the war in Iran, Trump instead dragged the GOP down the election denial rabbit hole farther than ever. His only concession to political reality was a brisk opening that repeated his standard claims that the country is already doing sensationally in every conceivable respect. Thus the only thing for him to do, it seemed, was to make sure his unbelievable record of success is rewarded by midterm voters who could only elect Democrats if fraud is involved.

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His prospective agenda on “election security,” aside from promises to investigate, prosecute and punish all the Chinese-led conspirators, was as expected, another I’ll-hold-my-breath-til-I-turn-blue demand for immediate congressional passage of the SAVE America Act, the constantly evolving bill to blow up voter rolls and greatly restrict voting by mail right before the midterms. Republicans and Democrats alike have told Trump countless times it simply won’t happen, with GOP Senator Thom Tillis trying to foot-stomp it this very day:

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I have been trying to explain for nearly a year that the SAVE Act, whether it’s the SAVE Act, the SAVE America Act, the new SAVE legislation that’s being proposed in the House, SAVE goes to Hollywood, SAVE goes to Hawaii, whatever the sequels are, all of them are fundamentally flawed and impossible to implement by this election.

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But nonetheless, Trump once again made this shoddy legislation the MAGA priority to top them all by urging his viewers tonight to bombard Congress with demands for it. He also cited a suspiciously timed new DHS report that claims evidence of hundreds of thousands of non-citizens voting in Democratic-run states. That would be news to the many researchers who have repeatedly found that non-citizen voting is negligible. Presumably, they’re in on the Chinese conspiracy as well. So are you, so am I, so is anyone who would presume to suggest that Donald Trump could lose a fair election.

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