Donald Trump is expected to address the nation on Thursday night while again pressing false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. The speech comes after he teased “really big news,” but no details have been disclosed about what he plans to announce.
The timing is what is driving the attention. Trump has spent his second term trying to use the levers of power to rewrite the history of 2020, and he is expected to do it again just as his allies and nominees are being asked to explain who won. Many of them have stopped short of repeating Trump’s language, but have also refused to say plainly that he lost.
That was on display on Wednesday, when Jay Clayton, Trump’s pick, was questioned by Mark Kelly at his confirmation hearing. Clayton said Joe Biden had the most electoral votes and was declared the winner, a formulation that avoided the direct answer Kelly pressed him toward. When Kelly asked whether the person with the most electoral votes is the winner or the loser, Clayton replied, “That’s your characterization,” and later added, “I’m not going to continue to do this.”
The exchange matters because it runs against the record established immediately after the vote. In the weeks after Trump lost to Biden in 2020, officials he had appointed to run the Department of Justice, cybersecurity agencies and intelligence departments said the election was fair, legitimate and free of major fraud or foreign interference. Trump has now embraced the opposite story, including conspiracy theories about an international cabal that penetrated U.S. voting machines, claims that have already led to libel suits against some of his allies when they repeated them.
Trump has also sharpened the rhetoric ahead of Thursday night’s speech. He said “it doesn’t get bigger, because without free and fair elections, you don’t have a country,” casting the address as a defense of democracy even as he keeps reviving falsehoods about the last presidential race. Election experts fear another round of misleading claims, not because the facts are in doubt, but because Trump keeps trying to make them sound otherwise.
What comes next is simple: the nation gets the speech, and with it another test of how far Trump is willing to push a false account of 2020 from the podium of power.
