Fox News may have been scared straight. After years of amplifying election denialism about the 2020 presidential election, the cable news giant now seems wary of giving Donald Trump’s latest revival of fraud accusations the kind of unquestioning oxygen it used to provide.
On Thursday night, the president stood before the cameras for roughly 22 minutes and delivered a White House speech about an election that ended nearly six years ago. It is worth sitting with this fact before getting to anything else: In the summer of 2026, with a midterm election bearing down on his party, the president used a primetime address to relitigate 2020. Trump announced he had declassified a trove of documents that he said proved foreign interference, voter fraud and a cover-up by the “deep state.” He ordered the Department of Justice to prosecute anyone found responsible. And by every honest account of what those documents actually contained, he proved none of it.
