President Donald Trump laid out dramatic plans in a Thursday night speech to unveil evidence of widespread election vulnerabilities within the U.S. Some congressional Republicans are still skeptical.
Democrats immediately panned the speech, which contained myriad falsehoods about foreign interference in American elections. Many Republican lawmakers have been largely silent about the speech a day later, seemingly disinterested in engaging with the president’s claims.
Republican leadership across the House and Senate did not amplify the president’s speech on X, nor did the official congressional GOP accounts. A handful of lawmakers used the night to promote passage of Trump’s priority elections bill or the Homeland Security Department’s announcement to ramp up efforts to root out noncitizen voting, an extremely rare occurrence.
But those leaving or already outside the president’s influence had more to say.
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Outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Kentucky), a Trump critic, said Republicans are “wasting our opportunity that the voters gave to us” and that they will receive an “absolute shellacking” in the November midterms if the party doesn’t “wake up.”
“We won all the damn elections, and we’re in charge,” Massie said in a video posted to X. “And what are we doing with it? We’re bankrupting the country. We’re starting new wars. We’re violating the Constitution.”
At least one Republican, who was granted anonymity to speak candidly about Trump’s speech and only saw clips of the address, told NOTUS that Trump’s China election-interference evidence “begs an investigation.”
The White House published heavily redacted documents on its website after the speech that appeared to contradict Trump’s claims of foreign interference, such as an unclassified email from a senior FBI official that expressed concerns over lending credibility to the claim that China tried to sway election results.
“It was a little complicated for a prime-time address,” the Republican said, noting that they did not think the earlier parts of Trump’s speech on tax cuts would land with voters weighing midterm candidates. The member said they expect briefings on the matter but lauded Trump for providing a website and actual data to convey his message about election-integrity concerns.
Outgoing Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas), a member of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said “there wasn’t a whole lot new” within Trump’s Thursday speech.
“We have 109 days until the midterm elections,” Cornyn said at the Aspen Security Forum the next day. “I don’t understand talking about what happened six years ago in light of these upcoming elections.”
Sen. Bill Cassidy (R-Louisiana), who joined Cornyn at the forum and will also exit Congress next year, said Republicans should be honing in on affordability instead of election security ahead of the midterms.
“My concern is that it’s setting up a Democratic wave election,” Cassidy said. “We should be talking about what matters to the people around the kitchen table, and right now they can’t afford their health care, their housing, their groceries or their gasoline.”
Sean Spicer, who served as press secretary during the first Trump administration, said in an appearance on NewsNation that the reactions to the speech were a “mixed bag” in conservative circles. He called election integrity an issue that resonates with members of the MAGA movement, but added that Trump should have detailed more concrete action in his address.
“We need to have more of a call to action, more of a to-do list,” Spicer said. “I saw a lot of negative comments online last night from the MAGA faithful saying, ‘What else can we be doing? What else are we doing?’ Raising an issue and then not having a solution is a little bit of a problem.”
John Solomon, a special government employee hired by the White House to review election documents, told CBS News on Thursday that Trump did not overstate any of the information provided to him by intelligence agencies during his address.
When Solomon was asked outside the White House if there was evidence to prove Trump actually won the 2020 election, he said, “Not yet.”
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