President Trump addressed the nation yesterday from the James S. Brady Press Briefing Room to underscore for the American people how important it is to "restore honesty and integrity to our elections." He said that his speech "may be one of the most important" he has ever made because of his "duty to defend the laws and the Constitution of the United States." The 46-minute, pre-recorded speech was conspicuously missing from major networks but was shown on OAN, C-SPAN, Facebook, and Rumble. The transcript can be found here.
He told the story of the 2020 election, starting with candidate Biden's campaign from his basement, to calling for mass mail-in ballots and their inherent risks for fraud, to an anticipated and protracted count of ballots. He recounted the planned, pre-emptive messaging from Democrats and the media regarding a possible contested election that called for the President to concede if he were to lose. He described what many now see as the Democrats' plan all along. "It was all very, very strange. Within days after the election, we witnessed an orchestrated effort to anoint the winner even while many key states were still being counted."
The President went on to describe how important it is for the American electorate to have confidence and "faith" in not only the 2020 election, but future elections. "It is not only about the 74 million people" who voted for him, but for all the people of our country.
He enumerated many of the "shocking irregularities, abuses and fraud" that have been revealed in the various swing states by lawyers from the Trump campaign and independent investigations including Sidney Powell's. Trump also spoke of both massive cyber fraud and what's being referred to as "standard" fraud carried out by election officials as well as the many lawsuits brought by citizens in many jurisdictions throughout the country. He described numerous sources of evidence and discussed sworn testimonies from witnesses who braved significant harassment to speak the truth about they experienced in the weeks and days before the election, on election day and even the weeks after.
His message clearly outlined the gravity of what appears to have transpired. The litany of alleged abuses are stunning. Among those he listed are: dirty voter rolls that resulted in millions of ballots being sent and returned by deceased individuals; alleged use of the pandemic to further "Democrat efforts to expand mail-in balloting [that] laid the groundwork for the systematic and pervasive fraud that occurred in this election"; absentee ballots that were not reviewed or processed legally; and the denial of meaningful observation of the election process to Republican poll watchers in multiple states in multiple venues. There was allegedly illegal duplication of ballots by the hundreds of thousands with multiple "observers [testifying] to seeing boxes and boxes of ballots, all bearing the same signature." Witnesses alleged blatant disregard of signature matching and voter ID procedures. Many witnesses allegedly saw fake birth dates by the dozens being entered into the system. Affidavits from many witnesses described votes being switched from Trump to Biden by hand, and by the use of USB drives from the Dominion Voting Systems being used in those states. He also spoke of the grave alleged cyber fraud that seems to be overwhelming in scope.
President Trump referred to the difficult road ahead in terms of how the country could fairly remedy such a profound insult to its election system. He seemed to convey a sincere sense that many of the various paths currently being pursued should, above all, seek remedies that use the witnesses and proof to ensure that all legal votes are counted.
"We already have the proof. We already have tens of thousands of ballots more than we need to overturn all of these states that we’re talking about," he said. "This is an election for the highest office in the greatest country in the history of the world. Every reasonable American should be able to agree, based on what we have already documented, that we need a systematic analysis of the mail-in ballots to review the envelopes. It’s about the signature. If they’re on the envelopes, we can only review the envelopes, and that will tell us everything."
The President concluded his speech with a profound reminder of the solemnity of his duty when it comes to a free and fair election:
"This is not just about my campaign, although it has a lot to do with who’s going to be your next president. This is about restoring faith and confidence in American elections. This is about our democracy and the sacred rights that generations of Americans have fought, bled, and died to secure. Nothing is more urgent or more important. The only ballots that should count in this election are those cast by eligible voters who are citizens of our country, residents of the states in which they voted, and who cast their ballots in a lawful manner before the legal deadline . . . moreover, we must never again have an election in which there is not a reliable and transparent system to verify the eligibility, identity, and residency of every single person who casts a ballot, a very, very cherished ballot . . . If we don’t root out the fraud, the tremendous and horrible fraud that’s taken place in our 2020 election, we don’t have a country anymore. With the resolve and support of the American people, we will restore honesty and integrity to our elections. We will restore trust in our system of government. Thank you. God bless you. God bless America."
