Trump's White House speech shows he's the real threat to U.S. elections

As a violent diarrhea epidemic spreads across the country because of slashed public health protections, much of the nation sits beneath an oppressive blanket of wildfire smoke fueled by climate change, we're back in a war with Iran that no one wanted, and ICE is actively killing people on our streets. Meanwhile, a grumpy, senile old man stood before the country tonight and lied about many things, including reheating his favorite conspiracy theories and attacks on trans people and immigrants. ABC, NBC and others declined to interrupt their broadcast schedules, choosing instead to stream this White House address rather than air it on their primary networks. This was a sobering reflection of how our national race to the bottom feels like a never-ending expedition.

Like a badger in the garbage bins behind a Buffalo Wild Wings, Trump tore into his favorite stale conspiracy theories with the kind of frenzied enthusiasm normally reserved for a day-old, discarded basket of Thai Curry Boneless Wings. The speech was a feast of suitcases stuffed with Chinese interference, the "deep state," and ballots that never existed. Dead people voting by the thousands. Millions of illegal immigrants casting ballots. Dominion machines secretly flipping votes for Hugo Chávez — years after Chávez was dead. Mysterious servers hidden in Germany. Space lasers. Poll watchers supposedly barred from counting rooms they were standing inside. Water main breaks. Midnight ballot dumps. Secret boxes under tables. Secret trucks. Secret algorithms. Secret foreign plots. All this as hundreds of lawsuits failed. Recounts, audits, Republican officials, and Trump-appointed judges all confirmed the results of the 2020 presidential election. Fox News paid nearly $788 million to settle litigation over its false claims about Dominion. None of it matters now though, because our dear demented leader still cannot get over his loss to Joe Biden.

Whatever supposedly explosive claims he regurgitates, the point was not to prove anything. It’s to flood the public with lies until the truth itself becomes impossible to locate. And to sell a bill so rotten the Republican party keeps hiding it in other legislation, hoping no one will notice. House Speaker Johnson might be a very bad, sneaky little boy, but he’s certainly not clever enough to be stealthy with a bill designed to make millions of eligible Americans prove they deserve rights they already possess.

The SAVE America Act championed by Trump would require Americans registering to vote in federal elections to produce documentary proof of citizenship, creating new bureaucratic hurdles for millions of eligible voters who don't have immediate access to a passport, a certified birth certificate, or other qualifying records. The voters most likely to carry those burdens are the same people who always seem to end up carrying them: low-income Americans, naturalized citizens, married women whose legal names no longer match their birth certificates, rural voters, people with disabilities, and transgender Americans whose documents often don't align because governments have spent years making sure they couldn't.

Congress is venturing beyond its authority by imposing new documentary requirements for federal voter registration, while others contend that forcing Americans to spend money obtaining passports, certified birth certificates, or replacement records raises the same constitutional concerns the Supreme Court addressed decades ago when it ruled that wealth cannot become a condition of voting in Harper v. Virginia Board of Elections. Republicans are asking Americans to accept one of the most sinister voting bills in generations as the cure for a fraud they have never come close to proving exists. The U.S. Constitution was written to constrain government power, not to encourage politicians to invent emergencies large enough to justify expanding it.

Trump has pushed congressional Republicans to use the legislation as a vehicle for unrelated attacks on transgender people by attaching provisions targeting trans athletes and gender-affirming care for minors. They aren't protecting elections. They're exploiting manufactured fear to make voting more difficult while using the same bill to wage another culture war against a community they've already spent years turning into a political punching bag.

On the flip side, the Democratic base is begging its own party to remember that opposition is supposed to oppose. Can we please have fewer strongly worded responses from the do-nothing Democrats who remain so hopelessly devoted to respectability politics that they seem perfectly willing to flush the country down the drain of an immaculate, perfectly polished toilet bowl? There isn't enough air freshener in the world to mask the stench of compromise wafting off Chuck Schumer and the generation of Democratic leadership that still believes this is a disagreement over tax rates instead of a full-scale assault on democratic government.

No more sternly worded letters. No more carefully calibrated statements expressing "deep concern." No more bipartisan fantasy camps where everyone pretends the adults will eventually return to the room if we're just polite enough. No more giving people "one last chance" to prove we can work together when they've spent the better part of a decade proving exactly the opposite. No more dragging every response through a focus group to make sure it won't offend the mythical swing voter who apparently lives in a suburb outside Columbus, Ohio, and has been personally deciding every Democratic communications strategy since the Clinton administration.

The political center they're so desperate to impress no longer exists where they think it does. It has been dragged so far to the right that Ronald Reagan would probably be dismissed as a woke globalist nonbinary person harvesting and pressing their own sustainable oat milk in Northampton.

I still think of myself as a patriot, though that word has been so thoroughly strip-mined by people who confuse nationalism with love that I'm almost embarrassed to admit I’ve ever been patriotic. I love this country and its impossible contradictions, its wildly diverse people, its deserts and coastlines and mountains, its small towns and giant cities, its accents, its music, its languages, and the stubborn belief that somehow all of it can belong to one another. Acknowledging that this is stolen land does not diminish its beauty. It reminds us how much responsibility comes with living here. We inherited something extraordinary, and we are still somehow supposed to leave it better than we found it.

We have a president and a political movement so consumed by a fictional version of America's past that they seem willing to hold the future hostage rather than admit the danger unfolding right in front of them. All they seem to want is yesterday, or at least the fantasy of yesterday: a country where women couldn't vote, where immigrants were white, where queer people stayed invisible, where the first Black president could be dismissed as a mistake history promised never to repeat, where police could kill with impunity, and so on.

I don't want the America they're trying to recover. I want the America we still have time to save, because if we keep treating the past as more precious than the future, there will eventually be no country left to argue over, no democracy left to defend, no common ground left to stand on.

Josh Ackley is a political strategist and the frontman of the queerpunk band The Dead Betties. @momdarkness