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The Trump Speech Republicans Are Pretending Didn’t Happen

WASHINGTON – President Donald Trump's White House praised his speech on Thursday night — laced with false statements and conspiratorial language about American elections — as a historic address that revealed critical information and fueled the push for must-pass legislation.

On the other hand, the leading Republicans in Congress, Senate Majority Leader John Thune (S.D.) and House Speaker Mike Johnson (La.), did not release statements in response to the speech.

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Even Trump's favorite morning show, "Fox and Friends," aired for three hours on Friday without ever mentioning the address.

While plenty of conservative Republicans lauded Trump's speech, the silence of party leadership drives home the gap between the personal obsessions now dominating Trump's presidency and the economic concerns the GOP desperately hopes Trump will focus on ahead of the midterm elections.

Instead, Trump talked about the "Deep State" supposedly covering up Chinese efforts to meddle in U.S. elections and the urgent need for Congress to pass an election reform bill addressing the supposed threat of voter fraud. Senate Republicans have already rejected the bill repeatedly, and even Republican election administrators say there's no use for it.

"Not helpful," one senior Republican strategist, who requested anonymity to speak frankly about a president notorious for punishing intra-party critics, said when asked for a review of Trump's speech.

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The White House hyped the speech heavily, and Republicans at the Capitol spent days shrugging off reporters' questions about what they wanted the president to say. It was obvious the backward-looking message about election fraud in 2020 wouldn't help them hold their seats in November.

Asked about Trump litigating 2020, Sen. John Kennedy (R-La.) said he believed American families were most worried about the basic cost of living in the U.S.

"But he's the president, and he was elected by the people, and he can talk about whatever he wants," Kennedy told reporters.

House Judiciary Committee Chair Jim Jordan (R-Ohio) said whatever the president wanted to talk about would be fine with him.

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"I'm going to be in New York tonight, but yeah, we'll watch. I'm sure it'll be good. He's always good," Jordan said, his voice rising hopefully.

"It'll be interesting," Sen. Eric Schmitt (R-Mo.) said. "I mean, obviously, everybody lived through 2020."

But the speech managed to be both tendentious and dull. There'd been speculation Trump would outlandishly declare Georgia's two Democratic senators were "illegitimate because of fraud" in 2020, the implication being Trump himself won the state that year, which he didn't. Instead, Trump wound up talking about how foreign governments "have the capability" to compromise U.S. election infrastructure. And he said Nicolas Maduro had overseen a rigged election in Venezuela.

"We are releasing documents that show the CIA obtained reporting of a specific plot to do a big number in favor of the corrupt Maduro regime in Venezuela," Trump said.

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The supposedly "shocking" intelligence documents the White House released with the speech also underwhelmed: They revealed some internal bickering over how much to emphasize China's preference for Trump to lose in 2020, but still concluded the country "did not intend to try to affect the election." Other documents purporting to show that a quarter million foreign nationals are registered to vote exhibit dubious methodology.

As much as Republican congressional leadership and political strategists did not want Trump to deliver a speech, many of the elected officials who have tied themselves to Trump praised it and echoed its conspiracy theories. The Trump-controlled Republican National Committee, for instance, used it to launch "Election Integrity Week" and recruit volunteers for poll watching this November. Sen. Mike Lee (R-Utah), whose never-ending advocacy for the SAVE America Act irritates leadership, praised it.

"After tonight, it's even clearer that the Senate should take the SAVE America Act and continue debating it until it passes," Lee wrote on social media, adding in a request for reposts of his message.

At the start of his speech, Trump attempted to trumpet lower inflation rates — caused by the brief pause in the Trump-launched war with Iran, which has since restarted – and his work on lowering pharmaceutical prices in particular. But the vast majority of the address was devoted to relitigating a six-year-old conspiracy theory.

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A mere 29% of Americans said Trump has had the right priorities in an Economist/YouGov survey released earlier this month, while 60% said the president has not focused on the most important issue. Even 23% of Republicans said Trump has focused too much on the wrong things.

The same survey showed Americans had definite ideas about what was most important: 30% said inflation and high prices were the most important issue facing the country, 15% said jobs and economy, and 9% said healthcare. No other issue received more than 5%. (To be fair to Trump, the poll did not directly give voters the option to name the 2020 election.)

While the cause of the stolen election was once powerful enough on the right to inspire Trump's followers to storm the Capitol, the issue's importance to even GOP voters has faded over time as Trump and the right-wing media ecosystem have repeatedly failed to deliver the bulletproof evidence they've promised.

"You're seeing dedicated Republican voters roll their eyes at this stuff at this point," the strategist said. "They want election integrity but they don't care more about that than the economy."

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