Bulwark Takes - Trump’s Own People Don’t Want Him to Give This Speech (w/ Erin Banco)

Episode Date: July 16, 2026

Sam Stein speaks with Reuters national security reporter Erin Banco about Trump’s planned election speech, his administration’s moves against federal election officials, and concerns inside his own White House that reviving voting-machine conspiracies could backfire by convincing MAGA voters to stay home.White House weighs releasing controversial intel on China and US elections, sources say: https://www.reuters.com/legal/government/white-house-weighs-releasing-controversial-intel-china-us-elections-sources-say-2026-07-15/Foreign Threats to the 2020 US Federal Elections: https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/assessments/ICA-declass-16MAR21.pdf

Hey, everyone. It's me, Sam Stein, managing editor at the bulwark, and I'm joined by my dear friend, the very talented, Aaron Banco, national... Why are you laughing? Don't laugh at that. You are my dear friend. You are my dear friend. You are very talented, national security reporter for Reuters. Aaron and I worked long ago at the Daily Beast. Aaron, you've been writing a lot on... Even though you're, well, I guess they're kind of coming together. You write on national security, and the intelligence community. And yet your most recent stories have been on election integrity or election security, I should say, and the administration's efforts to basically undo or sack a bunch of people, election officials. This is all culminating tonight, which is why we have you on this program, because Trump's giving a speech.

We think we know it's about, like, you know, did the Chinese hack the election? I don't know. What is your, yeah, well, what is your latest as we record this at one? 120 p.m. on Thursday. What's your latest sense of what it's going to be about? So I think, you know, headline broadly, you know, our election infrastructure is unreliable, can't trust it. That's, I think, kind of the main message we expect Trump to talk about or sort of the message he wants to send to Americans. And then I think, you know, sort of under that headline are two broad buckets of information. We'll probably hear about, you know, foreign interference in U.S. elections.

or alleged foreign interference in U.S. elections or intent of foreign countries to maybe one day interfere, right? I think we're a little unsure whether or not Trump is going to claim outright that a country, you know, interfered in our elections or that they had the intent and ability to interfere. Those are two very different things. But broadly speaking, he's going to be focusing on China a lot. And then he'll also mention Venezuela. And, you know, each of those countries have sort of a different backstory to them when it comes to U.S. elections and the narrative from the White House. Yeah, let's get into back story in a second, but first sort of the buildup. So I guess the first question of is why is this all happening now?

So listen, I've been covering this world only since the beginning of his second term. And the reason for that is because, you know, sort of in an unprecedented way, the intelligence community got really involved. in election work right away under mostly Telsie Gabbard was sort of at the helm of that effort. And so we've been tracking what the administration has been doing broadly, but also very specifically within the IC. And it's all part of this effort by the administration across several different federal agencies to sort of reshape the way Americans vote. And so whether it's the DOJ working on this or ODNI or what have you, that's sort of like the basic premise of what they've been trying to

And so the intelligence community specifically has been looking at our voting infrastructure, our voting machines, the machines themselves, whether or not they have flaws or vulnerabilities or need updates. So we've seen seizures of machines in Puerto Rico. We've seen seizure of materials from Georgia. So this has been a running theme in the intelligence community for quite some time. There's been sort of parallel investigations, one within ODNI and one from the White House under their former election integrity director. And a lot of this, though, was sort of probed and looked at and almost finished last October. So we were expecting to see something come out, you know, maybe in January or late last year. And so, but what we were worried about was that they might wait until it was too late to fix anything, right?

If there really were vulnerabilities in machines or flaws in machines, that could be fixed. right? Like these are flaws we've known about for a long time. And flaws, by the way, don't necessarily mean that, like, votes are going to be flipped. It just means like your computer needs an update. Machines need updates, right? But what we were worried about is that they'd wait until the very last minute to say anything and then say, well, well, it's too late. So got to go to paper or we're going to send the federal government.

I wouldn't rule out that possibility, right? Like there's a possibility tonight, for instance, that he does something like that, word. I want to get to that in a second, but you also reported on the firing of members of the Election Assistance Commission, which I think is obviously part of this, right? So I don't think a lot of people know what the EAC does and why it's significant, why states are kind of freaking out about this. Right. Can you explain that? Yeah. So the EAC is, you know, a bipartisan commission that's supposed to be overseen by Congress. And what it does basically is it works with state and local officials to administer elections. And that can mean a lot of different things. But one of the main core

functions of the AC is they need to pass guidelines and certified guidelines that states are supposed to follow in terms of how they use their actual machines. What systems they're supposed to be running on, right? Like they're the body that creates the guidelines that the states look to or the locals look to for what should we be doing on elections. And so what Trump did is he sort of ousted the remaining leaders of that agency. And it really did leave the agency paralyzed in the sense that they can't take up any new business by their bylaws. They can't really do anything at this point. And so, you know, if we hear Trump tonight talking about voting machines and vulnerabilities, and we know the White House has been very anti-EAC for a long time because they think that they're

not helping the issue. The question is, is Trump going to officially try to get rid of the EAC all together, to bypass it completely to do what he wants to do with voting machines, whether that be taking machines offline or sending a federal task force in to update them. Could he take machines offline? I mean, like, the perception is that this is state by state, right? Like, every state has its own voting methods. Well, he could declare a national emergency. He could write a Neo. Like he could try to do all these things. Yes, likely would it be shot down in court? Yes. But he could try to do all these things. And I think it sort of behooves us to understand that this is like not a slapdash effort. This has been a speech and an effort that has been planned for over the last year. Stephen Miller,

who is obviously a very prominent figure in the White House, has been very involved in this. We know the way Stephen works. He thinks ahead. He thinks about the law. He thinks about what we can, what they can try to achieve realistically and how to work the system, right? Like that's what he does. He's done it on immigration. He's tried to do it on the same. Act and on requiring papers for citizenship to vote. So, you know, it's unclear exactly what they'll try to do. But the firings of the EAC and the emphasis on the voting machines tonight suggest to me that they're interested in trying to do something with the machines.

And we know. Yeah. If I'm hearing this correctly, I'm going to try to summarize it the best. I can't. They have people inside the White House who are obsessive over this stuff, including Trump. and then includes Stephen Miller. Also, who's John Solomon, who is brought in,

who's been writing about this stuff. And the outside now is on the inside. They have taken steps to dismantle the federal infrastructure so that they can potentially assert themselves on the states. And then they're going to lay the predicate for all this tonight by saying there's real vulnerabilities out there. We have intelligence. we have gathered all this information from the past elections,

which show that these countries were able to manipulate the voting machines in these states and so and so forth. Therefore, the federal government has to move in more aggressively to protect our vote. That's about what we expect. That's a good summary. I mean, we don't know what they'll do, but we know they've talked about declaring a national emergency, creating a federal task force. I mean, will they actually talk about that tonight? I don't know.

This, to me, reads more of like, you know, this is the first time Trump has really in a big way from a podium, gotten up and talked about the election 2020, all the stuff he's been parroting over the years, right? He's going to have all his cabinet secretaries there. It's supposed to, well, a lot of them. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. And so it's supposed to be a show. And it's supposed to be a messaging campaign to the American people.

he's making his case to the American people, right? And Trump doesn't just get up and talk to talk. Like there's always what we know about. I don't know about that. There's always something. Well, sometimes he gets up to talk to talk. Not in a scheduled primetime address, you know, that is this is probably like one of the

which gets me to my point though. Like, why now? I mean, I understood what you said, but we are in July. What we were worried about as we were reporting this is that we were like, why aren't you fixing it? You're telling us there are vulnerabilities.

We're meeting with our sources inside the government. Why aren't you doing anything? And then it became clear like, oh, they're just going to wait till, like, logistically, you can't do anything other than pull stuff offline or whatever, right? Let's talk about the actual evidence we have of foreign interference, because it does seem like he's going to talk, as you said, about China, about Venezuela, maybe about Iran. I don't think he's going to mention Russia.

Just going to put it out there. No. The National Intelligence Council did put out a report in March 2021 about the 2020 elections. Yeah. You read the report. Yes. Okay. Just want to make sure.

Because I read it too. It's only like 11 pages. Good. Good for you. Yeah. I did my prep work, Aaron. Do you want to summarize it or should I summarize it? I mean, I can summarize the parts that I think are going to be important to the speech itself and specifically related to China. I mean, the underlying thing everyone should know

is that there was no suggestion or evidence or analysis that said any foreign country interfered or flipped votes at scale or, right? So let's start there. And then we get to the China piece. And you'll notice in this report that there's like a dissent section, and this is how the intelligence community works

and does these things. And there was a whole hoop law around this dissent back when this was all going on because it was viewed as very controversial at the time. And the dissent was related to China. And, you know, the people who wrote the dissent believed that China, you know, was really trying to interfere, right, in the election. And they were writing this, I should say, in the months prior to the election, even though this report came out after.

And, of course, it was the Trump, it was the Trump administration that put this report together. Correct. Correct. And so the dissent has been debated over time, right? But why it was controversial is because it really went, it went against the top line of the IC. You know, it challenged it. And so there are a lot, there's lots of underlying intelligence

that's attached to that dissent. There was also what we found out, what's called an alternative views paper that this analyst wrote that was highly classified and had all sort of the raw intelligence that he was pulling on to write this. And there's been some consternation inside the administration now about whether to declassify it for a lot of different reasons. But at the end of the day, that paper and that dissent still didn't say, despite, you know, going against the fact that, you know, the IC had said China didn't have the intention or ability to do intervention. It still did not say that China actually intervened, right?

Yeah. So I think that's really important. to know. I'll read from it. We assess that China did not deploy interference efforts and considered, but did not deploy influence efforts intended to change the outcome of the U.S. presidential election. They go on. We did not identify China attempting to interfere with election infrastructure or provide funding to any candidates or parties. We assess that Beijing also believes there's a bipartisan consensus against China in the United States that leaves no prospect for our pro-China administration, regardless of the election outcome. It goes on. Beijing probably expected that President

and Biden would be more predictable and eager to initially de-escalate bilateral tensions, but would pose a greater challenge over the long run because he would be more successful in mobilizing a global alliance against China and criticizing China's human rights records. So that's the China section. Right. And I'm glad we made that clear. And it's uncertain sort of exactly what Trump will say as it relates to China. I think broadly what he'll say is that it was like China's policy to,

to try to interfere in favor of Democrats because they didn't like Trump or, right? I don't think he's going to get into the baseline intelligence stuff because it's too complicated for them to try to talk about because, and it also exposes the fact that this cover up that they claim happened in his own administration. Right. So I think he'll try to like broad brush stroke, you know, sort of broadly say that China is up to no good as it relates to U.S. elections. And he'll insinuate a lot, but I sort of doubt he's going to come forward with any.

But it's so funny because he's got this weird relationship with China himself, where he's sort of, you know, vastly between. Like, he's going out. This is, right? Like, this is his number one thing that he likes talking about, right? Yeah, that's true. Now, the irony of all this is that this National Intelligence Report or Council report did say that one form of interference that foreign actors did engage in, and that included Russia and Iran, was a deliberate, aggressive campaign to actually make people in America doubt the legitimacy of their elections and their election infrastructure. So I'll read again. It was an influence campaign.

Yeah. Yeah. So they say some foreign actors, such as Iran and Russia, spread false or inflated claims about alleged compromises of voting systems to try to undermine public confidence in election processes and results. That's what Trump's going to be doing tonight. He's going to be spreading inflated claims about alleged compromises of voting systems to try to undermine public confidence in election processes. And I think. Isn't that ironic, as Alonis would say? Irony aside, though.

Yeah. You know, I think actually if you talk to people inside this debate, there are people who really don't want him to do this, right? This is like, not everyone's on board with this. They want the SAVAC passed. Well, like, I think there's a difference between wanting the SAVE Act pass, which has to do with, like, citizenship and it's more tilted in the immigration realm as it relates to, to, to elections. It doesn't talk about voting machines. It doesn't talk about voting infrastructure, right? So I think there are people who are very strongly in favor of getting that passed.

But when it comes to these, like, flaws in the system and China and Venezuela, like, I think a lot of people inside this debate right now view it as too risky to bring up again, right? Why? Because it will dissuade their own voters from using mail. They're worried about that. Yeah, I think they're worried about, I know there have been conversations in the White House over the last year about this, about the fact that if we put something out that doesn't have clear, you know, evidence that votes were actually flipped, right? Then all we're doing is sort of stirring the pot and telling our base what they already think, which is they can't trust the election infrastructure and then they won't show up to vote. So, you know, I think that's been a concern. Yeah. All right. So we'll be watching tonight on TV.

What time does he speak? 9 p.m. Okay. 9 p.m. You're not betting on it. Did you see that ABC news story about the teleprompter operator who bets on who was betting on Trump speeches? No. Go look it up.

Yeah, he was betting on Kalshi. Yeah, on Trump speeches made $100,000 but then got caught. Don't bet on his speeches. All right. Aaron Banco, thank you so much for doing this. Appreciate it. Everyone should be checking out of work. even though it's not here at the bulwark.

It's okay. Go read it at Reuters. It's everywhere. Of course. Anytime. Subscribe to the feed folks. Bye.