FAULTY: What did the president actually say?

THURSDAY, JULY 23, 2026

But also, the doomsday scenarios: Truly, it's been a "week that was."  

It has now been seven days since the sitting president, President Trump, delivered his televised national address—the televised address which wasn't televised by several networks and was then disappeared by Fox.  

Pretenders like Dana Perino have agreed to pretend that it never occurred! The speech has slid down the memory hole—but in the interest of preserving our flailing nation's history, what did the president say?   

For starters, he started by saying what you see below. Warning! As you can see on the videotape from the invaluable Rev, some of the things he said don't quite seem to parse:    

Trump Address to the Nation 7/16/26

Good evening. Before we begin, I'm proud to report that our country is safer, stronger, and far wealthier than it has ever been before. We are doing great. 

Less than two years ago, we inherited an economic and social disaster. After the worst inflation in 48 years, the wide-open borders with millions and millions of people pouring in from all over the world, including criminals of all types, and 11,888 murderers, many of whom killed more than one person. 

We had transgender for everybody, men in women's sports, crime ravaging our cities, and the whole world was laughing at us as a nation, but not any more. 

Two years ago, our country was dead. Now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. America is respected like we have never been respected before. 

Before he began, he said all that. He then added quite a few similar claims. 

That very evening, on The Last Word, Lawrence O'Donnell focused on the peculiar claim that, just two years before, we'd had "transgender for everybody." At this site, we googled the number 11,888, as we'd done quite a few times in the past, including the times when the president used to say that the bogus number in question was 13,099. 

(As everyone surely knows by now, we're now living in a post-fact, fact-free environment. There's no real point in trying to correct the president's endless misstatements, but for one of many factchecks of those twinned numbers, you can click here for a visit to FactCheck.org.)   

Before he began, he made those statements, many of which were clownishly bogus, a few of which can't exactly be said to be wrong. Then he began to say the things he'd promoted as being of prime importance. 

By now, the speech has disappeared—has been dispatched to the region where disregarded piffle dwells. But just for the sake of maintaining a record, these were his five main claims:

Tonight I'm announcing the immediate declassification and release of critical intelligence revealing shocking vulnerabilities in our election infrastructure...

The documents cover five major areas of concern. 

First, they show that, over a period of years, starting during the 2020 election cycle, the People's Republic of China carried out what is believed to be the largest compromise of election data in history, resulting in China's illicit acquisition of 220 million US voter files.   

[...]

Compounding the travesty, the second set of documents we are releasing reveals that members of the deep state, very, very famous group of people, many cases, in our intelligence agency, worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China's sinister election meddling, covering it up from both the President and the American people like nobody thought was possible.

[...]

The third set of documents we are releasing proves that for many years, Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure, including electronic voting machines and ballot counting systems dishonest almost all. They're vulnerable, and they're easily compromised and people within our government knew that. 

[...]

The fourth set of documents reveals that, even when significant evidence of fraud has been detected, it has been buried and covered up. Among the disclosures tonight are FBI files detailing evidence of alleged fraud by a large-scale voter registration operation in Michigan.  

[...]

Finally, to reveal just how vulnerable our elections continue to be, we are releasing the results of a stunning investigation by the Department of Homeland Security. According to the DHS review, state voter rolls, and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections. Since Democrat states refuse to share their voter files, the real number is actually much higher than that.   

Those were the basic claims, and those claims were accompanied by a profusion of lesser claims. Fact-checks were attempted by MS NOW and CNN, though everyone knows that we now live in an essentially post-fact environment. 

In truth, the ultimate fact-check was offered by the Fox News Channel, where Dana Perino and all the others agreed that the best way to deal with this presentation was to pretend that it hadn't occurred. On Fox, the messengers agreed to talk about the many "Commies" instead. 

On Fox, the various friends took a dive. But so it now goes within the Babel which the president decided to hail that night, for perhaps the ten millionth time, as "the hottest country in the world."

This very morning, just one week later, a new report by Vitali and Boudreaux appears at MS NOW. 

Given his obvious worries about our elections, what might the sitting president decide to do this fall? Democrats are preparing for a type of Doomsday, the MS NOW scribes report:

Schumer convenes Democrats to prepare for election doomsday scenarios    

For two hours Wednesday, away from the cameras, in a room just steps away from the Senate chamber, a group of powerful lawmakers rehearsed for some of their darkest fears about November’s midterm elections: disinformation triggering voter-roll purges in key states before Election Day, National Guard troops deployed to polling places as voters cast their ballots and the machinery of a free election seizing up in real time.

Almost a dozen senators, seated at long tables arranged in a U-shape, with notepads and water bottles before them, were walked through three hypothetical situations set before, on and after Election Day 2026. At points, screens displayed mocked-up graphics or artificial intelligence-generated videos that could be used to sow disinformation. 

The exercises are part of a broader effort by Democrats—both inside government and out—to prepare for anything ahead of November. Republicans often decry their fears as hyperbolic. They may yet be right. 

But multiple Trump administration officials have declined to rule out [sending] ICE agents or other federal law enforcement to polling places in the fall, though doing so would be illegal. And more GOP election deniers are rising into positions essential to safeguarding democracy in the 2026 midterms and 2028 presidential election. 

And so on from there.

(For the record, we have no idea what that last sentence means. The sitting president isn't the only person whose statements may sometimes be garbled.)

Democrats are said to believe that the sitting president may be planning to undermine November's elections. We can think of no serious reason to assume that this fear is misplaced.   

That said:

What, us worry? That's what David Brooks seemed to say, last Friday night, with respect to this widespread fear.   

Brooks is a good and decent person, and he's perfectly bright. Why in the world—why on earth—would he have said what he did?

Tomorrow: Jonathan Capehart's fears