Trump will give a national address focused on the election

President Donald Trump will home in on the alleged threat to the integrity of America’s election in his first State of the Nation address scheduled for Thursday at 9 pm ET.

It wouldn’t be the first time he did that. Trump has been claiming he is the victim of a “rigged” and “stolen” election since losing to former President Joe Biden nearly six years earlier, and has made similar claims about recent Republican contests.

Trump’s decision to give up his candidacy comes amid multi-level efforts by the president and his allies to reschedule the US election ahead of the November midterms. Polls show Democrats are favored to retake the US House amid Trump’s upset.

Trump is expected to repeat his false claims about the 2020 presidential election, while saying that foreign adversaries, including China, are working to influence the election, administration officials told MS NOW.

White House Press Secretary Caroline Leavitt said Thursday that news outlets are “underreporting” what Trump’s speech will include. But he hinted that Trump would make claims about security in the US election.

“The president is going to make a very important announcement about the integrity of our election,” he told reporters at the White House.

“We should have the safest and most secure election in the history of the world. And what the president will be talking about tonight will show you that maybe not, and we need to make some changes going forward,” he said.

Trump could also mention “a range” of other topics, including Iran and the economy, Leavitt noted.

Trump kept mum about the speech, his first official speech since early April, when he said the war on Iran – which is still ongoing – was coming to an end.

But he has repeatedly suggested that his remarks on Thursday night will focus on his handling of the US election and his plans to change it.

“It’s really big news, and our country has to practice,” Trump said at the White House on Tuesday when asked about the speech. “Without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country.”

Asked in an interview Monday night on Newsmax to preview the address, Trump cited last month’s Los Angeles mayoral election as an example of what he saw as a “tightened” race.

Trump made baseless claims of vote-rigging in the race even before his favorite, former television star Spencer Pratt, was officially defeated.

“Our election is crooked, and we have to fix it,” Trump told Newsmax.

The way to do that, Trump insists, is for Congress to pass the “SAVE America Act,” a controversial bill that aims to crack down on non-citizens who interfere in US elections by requiring photo identification to vote and proof of citizenship to register, among other provisions. Opponents say the measure will disenfranchise voters, especially low-income or people of color.

Federal law already requires citizenship to vote in US elections, and data shows very few cases where votes are cast by non-citizens.

But Trump has made the election bill his top priority ahead of the upcoming election. He even refused to sign other laws into law until the SAVE America Act reached his desk. And his supporters in the House have blocked other ways to reach the president as they push for an election law, which does not have a vote to remove Congress.

Trump’s Republican Party wants to keep its majority in the House and Senate past the midterms, but faces major challenges. The party that holds the White House has historically underperformed in midterm elections, and Democrats are aiming to capitalize on that in polls that have shown Americans’ negative views on the economy, the Iran war and Trump himself.

Trump wants to challenge the results of the election he opposes using all the means at his disposal.

After his loss in the 2020 election, Trump and his allies filed a number of lawsuits against state statistics, but none of the results were overturned and there was no concrete evidence of election fraud.

Attempts to overturn the 2020 result culminated in a riot at the Capitol on January 6, 2021, when a crowd of Trump supporters stormed the US government center and forced lawmakers to temporarily flee their homes for safety. Trump later pardoned or commuted almost all of the defendants involved in the scandal.

At the end of January, the election office in Georgia – the main target of Trump’s efforts to subvert the 2020 race – was raided by the FBI, which wanted records related to the 2020 election. Trump’s then Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, was spotted in the raid.

After Gabbard announced her resignation in May, Trump chose federal housing authority Bill Pulte as her replacement.

Pulte, who has earned a reputation as a loyal dog attacking Trump, is expected to join the president in this speech, MS NOW previously reported.

The Department of Justice has filed lawsuits in several states seeking detailed voter registration information. The DOJ argued that it needed the information to ensure compliance with federal election laws. More than a dozen such cases have been dismissed by federal judges so far.