Today, Explained - Trump's 2020 obsession

Episode Date: July 20, 2026

President Trump has a midterm message that Republicans hate and Democrats love. This episode was produced by Avishay Artsy and Denise Guerra, edited by Amina Al-Sadi, fact-checked by Gabriel Dunatov, engineered by Patrick Boyd, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. President Donald Trump addresses the nation from the White House on July 16, 2026. Photo by Saul Loeb/Pool/AFP via Getty Images. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. New Vox members get $20 off their membership right now. Transcript at ⁠vox.com/today-explained-podcast.⁠ Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The president of the United States was at the men's World Cup final yesterday in East Rutherford, New Jersey. He did the thing where he tried to photo bomb the winning team during their big trophy hoisting moment again. Based on recent World Cup final viewership numbers, more than a billion people were watching him embarrass himself. The president addressed the nation in prime time late last week, and he'd be lucky if a million people were watching him embarrass himself. NBC and ABC decided not to air it. Ditto over at CNN and MSNNNNN. Now, Fox took it, and CBS took it too, but they did the whole truth sandwich thing where they blast you with facts before and after to cushion the blow of what comes between. The speech was low energy and kind of confusing. We had transgender for everybody.

The president's living in the past and trying to drum up concerns about election security in advance of the midterms. It's not worth spending a ton of time on what he said, but on today explained from Vox, we're going to spend a ton of time on why he's saying it. I'm pretty confident talking into a mic. Hey, I'm doing it right now. But home projects, I second-guess everything. Is that noise normal? Is that water damage? And who should I even call?

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Today explained. Because if there can be no trust, there can be no greatness. And that's very simple. Today explained Sean Ramos from with David Weigel, who's a national political reporter at Semaphore. David, how did you spend your Thursday night? Well, taping another podcast, but also paying some attention to the president's speech, which was very hyped by the White House and by her. Republicans. And we encourage every American to tune in. That's what you do when you're trying to get

TV time for a national address and you don't have it in hand yet. And underdelivered. There can be different arguments about what was in the speech. But let's say it fell short of what Ohio Senator Bernardino said that it was going to be the most important presidential address since the JFK addressing the Cuban Missile Crisis. I mean, primetime address is a big deal. What was so urgent for the president? The arguments. before the speech asking for this time, it was unclear exactly what was in it. And if you wanted to go on a betting market, there are people speculating that he might have some updates on the Iran War.

He might have updates. This Marine was suggesting something important about China. What the actual speech was, was a kind of a preamble about how great things are going right now. Two years ago, our country was dead. Now we are the hottest country anywhere in the world. And then the argument basically that there had. been attempts to interfere in our elections, which we know about. Foreign attempts to interfere our elections are a factor we have known about for years, the factor in 2016, factor in 2020,

factor in 2024. He was saying, in so many words, that as president in 2020, when he lost, that he was not briefed fully on how much China was trying to interfere. Documents show that during this period, dozens of significant CIA and NSA reports about China's election targeting were kept out of the presidential briefing. And he wants, this is sort of a roundabout way he got there, he wants to use the full power of the government to force states to change their election laws along the lines he wants so that elections cannot be manipulated the way he thinks they're manipulated again. I say he thinks because there's a popular idea that's rounding a 10-year anniversary now

that, oh, well, Trump says a lot of things, but the media takes me literally. and people should be just taking him seriously. He very literally thinks that every election he's lost was stolen in some way. And he has moved the Republican Party into a position of agreeing with him. That if he says there was some question about an election, it was stolen, then it was. And we need to backfill a reason to explain that. He didn't spend the whole speech talking about China, but certainly China was a major focus. Like, what did China do?

Does he have some new evidence to introduce to the conversation? Yes, and again, there was intelligence analysis, things that were disclassified at the time about how China was trying to interfere with the election in 2020 through one thing he talked about was purchase of voter rolls. Tens of millions of voters' data in 18 states have been bought, stolen, or hacked by China. Well, voter rolls are not locked in a vault. People can purchase voter information. Nonprofits do it all the time. you'd like for foreign power probably not to do that. But this is a Trump tactic that he employs all the time of using names and innuendo to imply that something was done against him. The theft was committed against him. And a question that you saw the media that aired the speech wrestling with or didn't air the speech live was, what do you do if the president is issuing a bunch of innuendo that it's not necessarily news and you're airing it?

you then go and correct it. I've seen people who were defenders of the way the president conducted this by saying, well, the media aired a lot of questions about Russian interference in the 2016 election, and that wasn't all true. So how can they criticize Trump? Well, some of what was declassified after this speech goes back to the facts around the 2016 election, that there were indeed foreign hackers, Russians, obtaining emails from Hillary Clinton and releasing them, and that was interference in the election.

So wait, the stuff that he released after this speech actually bolstered. claims against his own election fraud claims? Yes. And so we're getting into Wonderland as we talk about this. At the higher level here, nobody disputes that foreign governments are trying to interfere in our elections in 2016, include, you know, buying Facebook ads that we're trying to manipulate the election, encouraging people to become non-voters if they were likely to vote for Hillary Clinton, things of that nature.

And it does get surreal because the only people who dispute that Russia was trying to interfere the 2016 campaign are Trump and the people around him. It's clear that it did. Nobody disputes that China was trying to influence the 2020 campaign. Democrats don't dispute that. What they were worried about coming into the speech was whether he would try to foment some desire for senators who are currently in office to be ousted, to be canceled, to be invalidated because of his allegations about 2020. And he didn't do that really. And you saw the extent to which Republicans want to be be on his good side was evident here because you had Tommy Tuberville, the senator from Alabama, and in interviews newsmax suggest. We probably have four or five senators that didn't legally win.

They shouldn't be up here. That's not something the president ended up saying. You had, Cynthia Lemma's senator from Wyoming, asked if they were illegitimate senators. In your mind, are senators Ossoff and Warnock duly chosen and sworn? I don't know. When that's again, not something the president was able to prove. This is where the speech was less important than the actions the government's going to try to continue to take to interfere in state elections. Because it's not the federal government. The federal government is trying to impose some standards on the states. It is states and counties that conduct elections.

And this is the second time Donald Trump has been president with some influence over what kind of grant states can get to run elections. That's the way that the administration is trying to. shape the midterms. What is he actually doing? Was this speech meant to kick off some new campaigns, some new initiative? So the Department of Homeland Security the next day announced, and this is Mark when Mullin, the new secretary there, announced that if states want grants to cover their elections expenses, they're going to need to, quote unquote, scrub their voter rolls.

Your voter restoration list needs to be scrubbed. Meaning audit the roles and get rid of people. people who have died, people who have moved. This is a very common problem. I've moved in the last year, and I'm still on D.C.'s voter rolls, and I need to call to get myself off. I don't intend to commit election fraud in the meantime. But right now, if you went into D.C.'s voter rolls, you'd find that I am on there.

And you could probably, if you wanted to wave a piece paper around and make it look like a conspiracy, it definitely could. That they need to also audit their machines. The machines had to be secured. Now, the administration is also trying to use control of the postal system. to manipulate how ballots are sent and received around elections. That's something Democrats have a lot of worry about because they still, in most states, Democrats, benefit from mail voting.

In addition to changing rules about mail-in ballots and scrubbing voter rolls, the Trump administration has fired a bunch of people who work in the federal government who litigated January 6th. They're redistricting, of course. they're changing voting restrictions. They're trying to nationalize elections. We've talked about many of these things in the show before. Is all of this not enough for the president?

It's not. And Republican voters believe, we've seen this in polling, that when Democrats have won elections recently, it has been stolen. They do not believe that Joe Biden won the 2020 election. They think it is ludicrous to say so. Come on, man. This is the Trump-led official position is that you have to say 2020 to was stolen. Now, the forward-looking Trump position is that,

in order to prevent this. Congress must pass the Save America Act. How easy is that to do unless you want to cheat? Which would put new federal standards on elections, most controversially, and this is something that gets, it's not even confusing, but it gets confused in the political debate, require proof of citizenship for voting. The White House likes to conflate proof of citizenship for voting for voter ID. Voter ID is very popular.

This is the thing of the Safe America Act. some of the principles don't sound crazy to people because America does have cumbersome elections based on our federal system where states run them. And there are people who look, not just Republicans, look with envy at France or India or Brazil. And you take swath to count things that count things pretty quickly because they have a biometric database and they have the same system of paper ballots in every single voting location. So there is some agreement in American politics that our elections could be less cumbers. them. It's just, it's kind of fruit from the poison tree when Trump is involved, because Trump starts from the premise that millions of votes literally are cast illegally against him, a thing that he had time to prove and did not prove. They don't really trust that Donald Trump

would, with new federal powers, implement voting rules that don't screw over Democrats. They also have listened to Trump, and he will say that if this bill passes, then we will not lose at election for 100 years. And so this bill, the Save America Act, has the support of most Republicans. Most Republicans in the House have voted for it. Some confident that it's not going to get through the Senate. And Senate Republicans have not been interested

in blowing up the filibuster to pass it for a combination of reasons, main ones being one, some don't believe this is a good law. Two, they have more to lose in the long run, they think. I think they're right. If the filibuster were to go away, any short-term gains for Republicans in one election would be undermined by the next time Democrats come into power, they can just blow past these old Senate rules and do whatever they want. It seems like a lot of members of the president's party wish he'd just focus on the economy, affordability, the things that voters really care about right now instead of election laws. Why won't he?

Is it because he's like minting billions while he's in office and he can't relate to people's affordability concerns? I think he believes this. He's wealthy, he's cloistered. He's surrounded by people who agree with him all the time. I think in Trump's information landscape, it is impossible for him to believe that people showed up in 2020 and said, I don't like this president. I'm going to vote for Joe Biden. Even Kamala Harris winning some states, he thinks was probably false.

So I don't think you need to overly psychoanalyze why the president's doing this. He just keeps saying it. The subtext is the text. He thinks that Americans want to. elect Republicans and Democrats are doing everything they can to rig the elections. We're going to ask David how the Democrats are responding when Today Explained returns. Support for Today Explained comes from Vanta. Every new tool your team signs up for every vendor that turns on AI features, every new

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The Hulu original series Furious is coming to Disney Plus, starring Emmy Rossum, Furious follows FBI agent Alice Black on the hunt for a mysterious and calculating serial killer. Both walk their own paths toward justice, and as their lives start to intertwine, the line between right and wrong begins to blur. Don't miss the three-episode premiere of the Hulu original series Furious on July 27th, only on Hulu on Disney Plus. Mr. President, do you have any reaction to today? It's laying being named the best news show.

Well, I didn't know that. I just told him you know for the first time. David, Democrats don't have a ton of power right now, but they might, if the midterms go their way, what is their response to Donald Trump's speech on Thursday night? Some Democrats welcome that he was doing this. I heard a failed president desperately casting about for excuses to meddle in the upcoming election if he can.

You saw John Ossoff, Senator from Georgia, who was on the ballot this year, who Republicans not even that privately think is going to be reelected. I also heard a president clearly signaling his intent to attack these elections and to undermine voting rights. And you know it's going to be right here in Georgia, the critical battleground state. It's one of the few states that's been trending towards Democrats, certainly in the south it is. And so it was very telling that John Alsop thinks it's a good day for him if he gets to talk about how the president thinks his election in 2020 was stolen. It's a big part of his campaign for re-election. He is depraved. He is amoral.

And above all, he cares exclusively about himself. And you mentioned the affordability pieces of it. This is a discourse in DC, too. There are a lot of Republican groups that want Democrats to lose the elections. and they think, how is the president convincing people that Republicans made their lives cheaper? Any day he's talking about this, he's not doing that. You know, there's this fake narrative that the Democrats talk about affordability. They just say the word.

It doesn't mean anything to anybody. One thing you've heard from a lot of Democrats and a lot of focus group managers, pollsters, just Americans think they live in a pretty democratic country. And if you talk about democracy, they zone out. It's not a good idea for Democrats talk about it. It's not a good idea for Republicans to talk about it. This is an elite conversation that happens to be an obsession for the president. It'll guarantee the midterms. If you don't get it, big trouble. And a story is coming together for Democrats who are not the most confident people right now, but think they will do well in the midterms, that Trump was elected in 2024, largely because people felt things were too expensive. And between, the Iran war self-enrichment in the White House and his obsession with the election, he's not going to do anything for your affordability. And when we take the House back, we're going to make

life more affordable for people is our singular priority. They're very comfortable making that argument. It's much tougher for them when they're fighting internally about Israel. Any day that the president comes and polarizes the discussion about elections, that's great for them. They want him to talk about elections and say, look with this president is doing while you're paying so much for gas. So what does that mean, just practically speaking? I mean, we have polls. Are the Democrats looking better to take the House and the Senate, or is Trump going to keep them?

Overall, polling and expectations are that Democrats are going to win the House, that they're going to gain seats in the Senate. What happens in elections, and I'm not trying to not answer the question, it's just having covered these stuff for 20 years. In many midterms, it's close through the summer. and then after Labor Day, it breaks in one direction. And so what Democrats are hoping is that there are stuff that's not competitive right now that becomes competitive. Now, the caveat on that, one is that no man steps in the same river twice,

that the same thing does not happen every election. That's bad analysis. But the other is that the legal and campaign financing regime that has been put into place in the last few years is very good for Republicans. And so Republicans in 2010 had a cash advantage over Democrats, but Democrats had just a terrible turnout and donor coalition to go back if you want to be amazed at how little Democrats were able to raise for Ohio Senate race in 2010. They just, they gave up. In the Trump era, Democrats have had a ton of money.

And they've had Democrats who were out fundraising people who ended up beating them by 10 points. They just did the Democratic donor base really woke up. Democratic dark money was very efficient. in the last few years, the Republican strategy. It's basically, in two parts. One, define the Democratic Party as dangerously radical, ready to undermine and destroy America. They've got some experience in doing that. And two, outspend them. That's the strategy. Pollsters, betting markets, they think that's not going to work. They think that the downward pressure of a president polling at 35 percent in some competitive states, that prices being high, it's just you're not going to be able to turn out a bunch of Republicans who've voted for Trump in 2004 or a bunch of independents who voted for Trump just because of prices in 2024. They're not going to come back. The Democratic electorate will come back. And Democrats will, let's say, win the popular vote by six points, win the House. And where does it all leave us for 2028, you think? I mean, midterms are important, but ultimately they don't bring out the same kind of turnout that we get for presidential election.

Are we seeing any signs of what this all means for 2028? If this midterm ends up being a story of Republicans blowing some opportunities because even though the economy has improved in a lot of ways, it didn't improve as much as people wanted. And he talked about voter fraud, et cetera. Democrats will be in a pretty good mood about 2028, but they have not agreed on not just their agenda. The issue in the Democratic Party, which has, I think, gotten worse this cycle, is that they're on year 10 of this entriest experiment with the Bernie Sanders movement. In my view, we must move forward toward a Medicare for all single-payer program. But since 2016, the Democratic Party has been seen by a lot of voters as basically corrupt as trying to, to prevent new voices, new voices from the left from taking charge as in a war with its own left wing.

And that has been the way that the progressive wing of the party wants it. They basically, when they are not in power, as they've never been, because Sanders never been the nominee. And the party loses, they say it's because the party did not run on progressive messages. If they win, as the Democrats won in 2018 and 2020 and 2022, they say, well, this is progressive messaging that won the day. because they lost in 2024 in a devastating for liberalism fashion, an election loss that means USAID is dead and the Department of Education is falling apart and affirmative action is dead, et cetera, et cetera. The left is really capitalized on Democrats to spare and it's organized Democrats,

the rallies and what you can do for action that have come since the 2024 election have been pretty much less left wing. The existential threat of Trump to liberalism and the decisions that donors to the Democratic Party into progressive groups have made have led to a, I'd say, a less ideological infrastructure. So there were a lot of, they were in 2019. The last time Democrats were out of power and trying to come back, a lot of groups arguing Trump was a fluke president. We are the sunrise movement. We want people to commit to a Green New Deal. We are an immigration group. We want to commit to a deportation moratorium. We are a planned permit.

We want to commit to abortion funding. There are lots of demands made on the party and the candidates moved to the left. That's not happening this time. What's happened instead is this thing I was talking about where there is no agreement about what they did under Biden, whether they went too far to the left or what. And a left flank that is saying, just let us take the wheel. Let us run on Medicare for all. Let us run on cutting all aid to Israel, even on weapon sales to Israel.

So Democrats are just destined to have a fight, but a very different fight they had in 2019 because there's no wing of the party that says we know that our ideas are going to work. They were much more confident, much more money being spent to organize progressive groups in the first Trump term than there is now. So if it looks messy, it's because it is very messy. There is not a figure leading the Democratic Party with a unified Trump message. The closest you get is not the leadership of the party. It's Bernie Sanders.

Too many working class families are struggling just to survive right now. We are going to have an economy that works for all, not just must and bezos and the 1%. It is Bernie Sanders, who's a popular politician having mass rallies around the country and saying, Democrats haven't really done anything for the working class in 30 years. That's not amazing. Base to build your comeback message on that our party's been terrible since the 1960s, arguably, please let us back in and we'll fix things. So it sounds like what you're saying is that the one thing the left and the right can both agree on

is that 2028 selection will be about communism. You know what? That's a really pithy, good way to put it. Read David Weigel at Semaphore.com. Abyshae Arzzi and Denise Guerra made the show today with help from Amin al-Assad, Gabriel Donatov, and Patrick Boyd. On tomorrow's today explained, we're going to talk about the divide in the Democratic Party over cutting aid to Israel.