CNN's first reactions to Trump's primetime election speech

[0:00] The president has just concluded his speech tonight that is focused on U.S. elections and [0:05] what they say is attempts at foreign interference in U.S. elections, as the president also brought [0:12] up conspiracy theories about the recent California primary, theories that are unfounded. And I should [0:17] note that unlike the claims he made about the 2020 elections, he has also offered no, like I [0:23] should say the claims he's made about the 2020 elections, he offered no documents to back up [0:27] what he said about what happened in California. [0:31] Evidence of fraud has been buried. Hundreds of thousands of noncitizens and dead people [0:38] are listed and active on the voter rolls. And yet we still have elections with no voter [0:44] ID, no proof of citizenship and tens of millions of ballots floating aimlessly through the mail. [0:52] As one example of the insanity, California's recent election for mayor of L.A. and governor, [0:58] was held on June 2nd, a long time ago, but it was just completed a few days ago on July [1:06] 10th. Think of that much more than one month. Took a month to count the votes. I wonder what [1:12] they were doing. This is worse than any third world country. There's no third world country [1:18] that has elections like we have. [1:21] That's because officials would say that U.S. elections are a lot stronger than third world [1:27] country elections. And it's important to note, as you were listening to the president and his [1:31] arguments tonight, that really all of this is in the context of the president trying to push [1:35] the Save America Act, as he calls it, the Save Act, as it's known on Capitol Hill. [1:40] Right now, it cannot pass on Capitol Hill because it doesn't have enough Republican votes in the [1:45] Senate. And John Thune, who is the leader of Senate Republicans, has made clear they are not [1:49] willing to get rid of the filibuster and don't have the votes to do so in order to lower the threshold [1:53] of how many votes it needs to get passed. The president's entire argument tonight as he was [1:58] building up with these newly declassified documents from his officials was about the Save Act in and [2:04] of itself. Yet still, it's not clear and unlikely that that's going to change the minds of Senate [2:10] Republicans. My colleague John King has been watching this speech. And John, obviously, this [2:15] is something the president has been pushing for with increasing fervor as we get closer to the [2:19] midterms. What was your takeaway from tonight? A lot of ominous tone from the president, ominous [2:25] words from the president. It sounded more like a spy novel. A familiar complaint to you, Caitlin, about [2:30] the deep state. The most striking thing the president did was he focused mostly on China. And he said he was [2:36] releasing all of these new documents tonight that were going to prove more things about China, he says, [2:41] trying to get voter roll information, trying to learn about how to pry into voting machines and voting [2:46] systems. He never directly connected any of that to changing an election result. That's important. I [2:52] don't have the documents in front of me. We'll see if they get you there, but the president never did. [2:55] The only time the president said anything about nefarious action actually changing an election [3:00] was he said there are documents here showing how China helped the Maduro regime in Venezuela in 2020 [3:07] change votes to stay in power. That is the only specific claim of actually rigging or changing an [3:12] election result the president made. Much of it was, again, China's trying to do this. Russia did a [3:18] little bit of that. But again, focused mostly on China about things we've known about, things that [3:23] have been in past intelligence reports about China. Yes, trying to get information about U.S. voters. [3:28] Yes, trying to test the vulnerabilities of U.S. election systems. But nowhere did the president in [3:33] that speech connected to they changed the result in this state or they changed the result in this [3:38] precinct. There was no connecting the dots to that point in the speech. I don't have the documents [3:43] in front of me. Our team is looking at that that way. But the tone of it was overwhelming. What was [3:47] most striking to me, Caitlin, you covered the Trump White House at the time, was he had a boogeyman and [3:52] it was the familiar deep state. The president saying that this was all kept from him, kept from John [3:58] Ratcliffe, his then director of national intelligence, kept from Gina Haspel, his then CIA director. Marco [4:02] Rubio, who's now the secretary of state, was the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee at the [4:06] time. He has access to just about everything in U.S. intelligence. But Trump was making the point [4:11] that people working for him, maybe they were there in prior administrations, were keeping this [4:16] information away from him about what he alleges is a deeper, more nefarious Chinese plot than we have [4:22] ever known about. Look, the proof will be in the documents. But again, the president never connected [4:28] the dots in any way to saying, and they did this in Georgia, for example, or they did this in Arizona, [4:33] for example. He talked about a democratic voter registration group in Michigan that he said as [4:38] if, you know, this is a horrible, horrible thing. They were giving out gift cards to people if they [4:43] registered more voters, as if there was some nefarious nature to that. So a lot of it was [4:48] greatest hits. There were some new allegations about China having maybe a more aggressive role [4:54] than we've known about in the past. But again, nothing from the president where you can say, [4:58] Party X did this, changed an election here in a way that changed the outcome. I did not hear one [5:04] word of that. I heard a lot of ominous. And again, he says he wants the Congress to pass the SAVE Act. [5:09] I've spoken to a number of experts today who think foreign meddling is a problem. The United States [5:15] should do more about it. They don't see much in the SAVE Act that does anything about that. They [5:19] think it's all about Trump's voter ID push. John, as someone who covered the White House, [5:23] have you ever seen a primetime address or heard a primetime address like this one? [5:30] No, no. And again, again, if the president has new information about foreign meddling, [5:39] foreign meddling is a big deal in our elections, has been for quite a long time, [5:42] has been quite a long time. It's gotten caught into a very polarized debate because of the Mueller [5:46] investigation because of after 2016. It is impossible now in the Donald Trump era to have [5:51] an adult conversation about a very legitimate issue. It would be nice if Democrats and Republicans [5:55] could get together. As the president said at one point, why can't we do this on a bipartisan [5:58] basis? Well, he's the reason they can't do some of it on a bipartisan basis because he keeps telling [6:03] Democrats they're crooks and they stole elections. But no, the ominous tone of it, you know, presidents [6:08] speak to the nation when wars start. Presidents speak to the nations after tragedies. Presidents [6:14] do speak to the nation to ask for big policy priorities, but we're 15 and a half weeks from an election [6:19] in which, you know the numbers, the president's approval rating is in the 30s. His party's in deep [6:23] trouble. This is not the issue they think is going to save them in November. [6:27] John King, thank you for, as always, watching with us. And I should note, as we were listening [6:32] to what the president said tonight, here's another quote from him during this speech. [6:38] Finally, to reveal just how vulnerable our elections continue to be, we are releasing the results of a [6:44] stunning investigation by the Department of Homeland Security. According to the DHS review, [6:51] state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered [7:01] to vote in federal elections. Since Democrat states refuse to share their voter files, the real [7:08] number is actually much higher than that. Yet, even this limited analysis found more than a quarter [7:15] of a million foreigners illegally registered to vote. [7:19] Evan Perez, you're also following the speech. Is any of that true? [7:25] Well, it is based, there is a report from the DHS and it is based on an analysis that was done [7:30] drawing from private sector data. The problem is, as the president has pointed out, that some of the [7:37] states, of course, that manage this data have refused to turn over their voter rolls to the DHS [7:43] and to the federal government. And that includes some Republican states, some Republican-run states [7:49] who have also refused to do this. And so it is true that there is some data out there, but it is not [7:57] reliable. This is private sector data. The government data would obviously be a lot more effective. [8:02] And also, the other issue here is that the number of people who may be noncitizens, who may be on these [8:08] roles, does not indicate that any of them have actually voted, right? I mean, we've seen analysis [8:13] after analysis of this. It is a very tiny problem. I think the Heritage Foundation did an analysis of [8:20] this from 2002 to 2022, and they found about 100 instances of this. So the president is pointing out [8:29] to something that is an issue, but it is not the issue that he is making it out to be.