WASHINGTON — President Donald Trump on Thursday night used a historically stunning primetime address to peddle unfounded conspiracy theories about the 2020 presidential election, taking a major political risk as Republicans fight for their congressional majorities and conjuring warnings from Democrats about November’s midterms.

Trump appeared eager to sow doubt about the results of November’s midterm elections a day after his vice president, JD Vance, said the administration would accept the outcome of congressional races. Trump tied his new allegations about the midterms to his recent aggressive push for Congress to send him the SAVE America Act, a package of GOP-crafted election restrictions that Senate leaders have told him cannot pass their chamber.

The administration was releasing hundreds of pages of previously classified information it claims would show “the largest compromise of election data in history,” the president said. Specifically, Trump accused China of the “illicit acquisition of 220 million U.S. voter files” through a special intelligence unit it created to focus on U.S. elections. He did not, however, directly link those alleged Chinese efforts to the changing of any Americans’ votes.

Nor did he mention a March 15, 2021, National Intelligence Council report filled with findings that contradicted, with “high confidence,” many of the claims he made Thursday evening.

Yet, Trump claimed his second administration’s investigation found that China allegedly tried to “influence” the 2018 midterms and, beginning in 2019, the 2020 presidential race that he lost to Joe Biden. “They wanted to just make you sound like your president wasn’t so hot, when actually your president has done a great job,” Trump said, referring to himself.

He warned of “rogue bureaucrats” and called the U.S. election system “so broken and so vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it, adding: “Our (voting) machines and ballot counting systems are exposed to hacking and manipulation and corruption.”

But at no point did he connect those alleged dots to any actual successful efforts by China or another foreign entity to change votes or actually influence an American election’s outcome. He even described “raw intelligence,” something presidents almost never see — much less describe during a primetime address.

House Intelligence Committee ranking member Jim Himes warned the president could be setting the stage to meddle in November’s midterm elections.

“The president was setting the context. He was setting the basis for him to turn around at midnight on Election Day and say, ‘I warned you. I warned you back in July that the Chinese were doing X, Y, Z, and the Venezuelans were doing X, Y, Z, and all this terrible stuff,” Himes told MS Now. “It happened tonight.”

Himes then painted a fictional — but possible — scene for a different Trump address in November, saying the president could then say, “‘I am deploying federal officers from the Department of Homeland Security to seven states. They will be seizing ballot boxes in those states because we know that lots of undocumented aliens voted in those things. So we are seizing ballot boxes now.’ What happens when all of a sudden we’ve lost the chain of custody of 70 ballot boxes? … That is the moment in which American democracy dies. Make no mistake (about) what happened tonight.”

And Rep. Joseph D. Morelle, ranking member of the Administration Committee, told C-SPAN moments after Trump wrapped that he heard a chief executive preparing an effort under which he could be “calling into dispute 2026.” He said Trump’s intention was to “sow so much confusion” that in the coming months he “can claim extraordinary powers” to carry out a “fundamental effort to weaken the foundation of our democracy.”

‘Can’t get over 2020’

More than 1 in 4 Americans (28 percent) continue to believe the 2020 presidential election was “rigged,” though views remain sharply divided along partisan lines, according to a YouGov-The Economist poll conducted last month. Half (50%) of Republicans hold that view, compared with 9% of Democrats. Among Republicans, identification with the MAGA movement is a major dividing line: 66% of self-identified MAGA Republicans believe the election was rigged, roughly double the 32% of non-MAGA Republicans who say the same.

Trump opted to mostly make his unfounded 2020 election claims less than four months ahead of midterm elections that will decide which party controls the House and Senate. The outcomes of congressional races in November will decide the future of his remaining domestic agenda, and a Democratic-run Senate would largely quash his team’s desire to continue populating federal courts with conservative judges.

Democratic lawmakers on Thursday described Trump as obsessed.

“I’m sorry that the people of Georgia so hurt Donald Trump’s feelings that he can’t get over 2020, even after he won 2024. I suggest he go see a therapist,” Sen. Raphael Warnock, D-Ga., said at a voting rights event on Capitol Hill. “We’re going to the polls, and we’re going to hold him accountable.”

House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries later told reporters Trump “needs to be checked out,” adding he should focus on “driving down the high cost of living” rather than “conspiracy theories.”

Before the primetime speech, Trump had mentioned election fraud 544 times since January 2025, the year he returned to office, according to data analyzed by Roll Call’s Factba.se. And since he launched his first presidential bid in June 2015, he had referred to it 3,062 times. In 2026, to date, he has raised election fraud an average of 1.30 times per day — once every 18 hours, 28 minutes, Factbase found. His focus has not been just on presidential elections. International, House, Senate, state and local elections are all suspect to him — especially when his side loses.

Trump’s attention seems to be imperfect. He has never mentioned a North Carolina 9th District race in 2018. McCrae Dowless, a GOP operative, was found by a bipartisan Board of Elections, unanimously, to have committed ballot harvesting and tampering. Republican Mark Harris’ win was tossed and Republican Rep. Dan Bishop subsequently won the new election and was seated in Congress. Out of 132 U.S. races at all levels of government, Trump has missed that one in his many comments and social media posts.

Trump decided to go ahead with the address despite a Washington Post-Ipsos poll released on Thursday morning. It showed his standing with remains weak, particularly on the economy and Iran, complicating Republicans’ efforts to defend their congressional majorities. Overall, that poll found 37% of surveyed U.S. adults approved of Trump’s job performance, while 61% disapproved.

‘Too big to rig’

Still, one former senior aide to House Republican leaders poured cold water on any notion that Trump’s primetime allegations could hurt his party.

“Anytime the American people hear directly from President Trump live and unfiltered it’s a good thing,” Aaron Cutler said in an email. “President Trump is the leader of the Republican Party, so yes, Republicans want the President addressing the nation now and often before Election Day.”

Sen. Maria Cantwell, D-Wash., speaking during the same Thursday voting rights event as Warnock, called on local election officials to push back on any possible actions the administration might take. She recalled a recent conversation she had with an elections official in her home state.

“I asked that election official, ‘What are you going to do if Homeland Security tries to come in and say you can’t even mail out those ballots?’ He says, ‘I don’t give a damn if I have to Uber them. I’m getting the voters their ballots,’” Cantwell said. “And all we have to do now is evangelize getting them in the ballot box.”

Warnock on Thursday said Trump was purposely attempting to play on voters’ fears: “One of the most significant things they’re trying to do is that they’re trying to weaponize despair. … They’re trying to convince us that they’ve already won, and if you’re convinced that they’ve already won, then you stop fighting.”

In a remarkable moment earlier Thursday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt admitted the administration only has gripes with elections that Republicans — mostly the one in the Oval Office — lose. A reporter during a rare briefing pressed her about why the administration was not examining whether any fraud plagued the 2024 election.

Tellingly, Leavitt, with a wide smile, replied using a phrase made famous by her boss: “Because it was too big to rig. … There was a massive amount of votes for this president. That’s why he’s in the Oval Office right now.”

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Bill Frischling and Valerie Yurk contributed to this report.

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