Dispatch Live: Assessing President Trump’s Election Integrity Address

In a special live Dispatch Podcast, Dispatch founder and CEO Steve Hayes was joined by Dispatch politics editor Michael Warren and senior editor John McCormack to discuss President Donald Trump’s Thursday night election integrity speech. Steve Hayes is CEO and editor of The Dispatch, based in Annapolis, Maryland. Prior to co-founding the company in 2019, he worked at The Weekly Standard for 18 years, covering Washington, politics, and national security. Steve is the author of two New York Times bestsellers. He also worked as a contributor at CNN and Fox News, and currently serves as a political analyst at NBC News. When Steve is not focused on The Dispatch, he’s probably traveling with his family, grilling, or riding his mountain bike. Michael Warren is a politics editor at The Dispatch and is based in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the company in 2023, he was an on-air reporter at CNN and a senior writer at the Weekly Standard. When Mike is not reporting, writing, editing, and podcasting, he is probably spending time with his wife and three sons. John McCormack is a senior editor at The Dispatch and is based in Washington, D.C. Prior to joining the company in 2023, he was Washington correspondent at National Review and a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. When John is not reporting on politics and policy, he is probably enjoying life with his wife and daughters in northern Virginia or having fun visiting family in Wisconsin. The podcast transcription below was generated using artificial intelligence and may include occasional errors or misspellings. Steve Hayes 0:00 [upbeat music] Morning, everybody. Welcome to the Dispatch Podcast. I'm Steve Hayes. Uh, joining me today are my two Dispatch colleagues, politics editor Michael Warren, senior editor John McCormick, for a discussion about President Donald Trump's primetime address to the nation last night on elections, as well as the confirmation hearings of two of Trump's nominees who could play a role in the midterm elections coming up in November, a little more than three months from now. Gentlemen, welcome. Mike Warren 0:37 Morning. Steve Hayes 0:37 Uh, Mike, I wanna start with you. President Trump spoke from the East Room of the White House last night for just short of a half hour in remarks that weaved through banal conspiracy theories together with end times hyperbole, all seemed designed to undermine confidence in the way the United States conducts its elections and the results of those elections themselves. The speech, Steve Hayes 1:06 I would say, was largely a dud, devoid of the kind of shocking revelations or big news that the president himself, that many of his supporters had promised in the lead-up to the speech. But just because a speech is uninteresting and at times unintelligible and ultimately unpersuasive doesn't make that speech unimportant. So what did the president say, and why does it matter? Mike Warren 1:37 The president began this speech in an interesting way. This was, this was billed as a, you know, going th-- going to release... He eventually said he was going to declassify a bunch of information about election fraud. This is very important, uh, information, and it was important for the American people to know it, and he started it with kind of a quick survey of how great his administration is going. Uh, it sounded like a bit like a campaign speech at the very top. I think that's revealing of, uh, the substance or lack thereof of the speech that followed. You know, he was talking about new golden era, talking about, uh, all of how, uh, the, the border was, uh, had, had been so open and so terrible, and now it's closed, no illegal... Yeah, all this stuff that doesn't have anything, you know, uh, at, on its face to do with the premise of the speech. The other thing that he, that, that he sort of didn't deliver on, and then I'll get into what he actually delivered on, was, you know, there was this sense in the run-up to this speech that he was going to be making some very bold, new bold claims. Uh, the biggest one that was sort of floated out there and, and never came to pass was that he was going to claim somehow that the elections in twenty twenty, and particularly in twenty twenty-one, uh, the, the runoff election in the two Georgia Senate races that were, there were runoffs from the, the previous twenty twenty general election, uh, where you saw two Democratic senators from the state of Georgia win those two seats. He was going to somehow claim that those two races were illegitimate and that, that, uh, that Raphael Warnock and Jon Ossoff, those two Democratic senators, were, had not been legally or properly, uh, sworn in as senators as a result. And that never happened, [chuckles] and it would have been sort of a, a real kind of explosive claim. Instead, what we heard was kind of a rehash of, as you said, the, the kind of banal conspiracy theories about the twenty twenty election with a different flavor that, that sort of claimed no, no longer were, you know, things happening in Venezuela, for instance, where, uh, that was one of the claims from back in twenty twenty, if we can remember that far back, uh, that somehow, uh, Hugo Chávez's regime was, uh, tampering with, [chuckles] with the, uh, with the election results somehow, that there were other examples of foreign interference. This was specifically, uh, last night laid at the feet of China, and that somehow China was in, uh, wa- wa- was somehow interfering in the twenty twenty election. Uh, the, the evidence that he pr- that he presented, and this was all posted, uh, simultaneously during the speech on the White House's website. There's four tranches of declassified documents, which by the way, uh, a, a lot of which are, uh, essentially rehashing things that bipartisan groups of, of folks on the Hill and election, you know, monitors, uh, in, in both parties have been claiming have been a problem for years, which is just the, the idea that, uh, that there are foreign actors who look to, to, you know, who are seeking to, uh, interfere, to cause chaos, uh, and distrust within, uh, our election system. But the actual evidence is, is pretty v- much nothing. It's pretty much saying that there are, there, the... It, it's individual documents that claim that somebody told a source that the Chinese were somehow going to w- try to interfere with the election. I mean, the, the degrees with, a- away from actual verifiable actions that were taken, uh- Interactive transcripts are available to Premium members. Join to follow along with the audio. Join Now