Donald Trump’s latest primetime address landed with a thud Thursday night, triggering a wave of backlash after he spent much of the speech reviving debunked election conspiracy theories and accusing foreign governments of tampering with the last three U.S. elections, all while demanding Congress pass his restrictive SAVE America Act.
The speech left many Democrats openly questioning Trump’s fitness for office, with some arguing it crossed a line.
“This is a 25th Amendment moment,” California Gov. Gavin Newsom said after the speech, invoking the constitutional process for removing a president who is unable to carry out the duties of the office. “I just watched the ramblings of a mad king, and what else can I say—the only thing missing was tinfoil. Donald Trump is trying to rig our elections, and we have to stop him. Show up and VOTE this November.”
Rep. Yassamin Ansari echoed the sentiment. “How can anyone deny the urgency of the 25th Amendment at this point,” she wrote.
Others zeroed in on what they described as Trump’s increasingly detached election claims.
“Tonight I heard a failed and desperate president who, as war spirals and prices rise, is as always focused on his grievances, his shame, and above all his fear of the accountability that will come with defeat,” Sen. Jon Ossoff posted on X. “I also heard a president signaling his unmistakable intent to attack these elections and our voting rights, just as he tried to throw out our votes and seize the presidency in 2020. Our answer will be overwhelming.”
Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer accused Trump of recycling old conspiracy theories while withholding records tied to Jeffrey Epstein.
“Donald Trump is releasing unverified, meaningless documents to appease his own delusions about an election he lost resoundingly, all while continuing to withhold 3 million pages of the Epstein files,” Schumer wrote.
House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries didn’t mince words either: “Donald Trump is a feeble, unhinged conspiracy-peddling 80-year-old failed president. The economy is a disaster under this guy and the American people know it. Pathetic.”
Rep. Jim McGovern mocked the internal logic of Trump’s claims.
“Trump says Democrats forgot to rig the election in 2016, successfully rigged it while he was president in 2020, then forgot how to rig it again in 2024. So the only election Democrats supposedly stole was the one he himself controlled,” McGovern wrote. “You have to be a special kind of stupid to believe this bullshit.”
Voting rights advocate Stacey Abrams argued the speech was less about national security than reviving Trump’s long-running effort to undermine confidence in elections.
“Donald Trump just used a primetime address to relitigate an election he lost six years ago—and to demand new laws making it harder to vote,” Abrams wrote. “Americans see through the lies. He tried this in Georgia first: a call to ‘find 11,780 votes,’ a raid on Fulton County, and now a war on the ballot itself. That’s not democracy. That’s cowardice. America, we’ve beaten it before.”
Sen. Adam Schiff also pointed to Trump’s history of trying to overturn the 2020 election.
“Tonight, the same President who once badgered Georgia’s Republican Secretary of State to find 11,780 votes that didn’t exist, so he could overtake Biden’s lead in the state in 2020, put out a whole new set of lies about our elections, past and present,” Schiff wrote. “All of his claims and the selective release of any documents must be treated with the greatest skepticism given the President’s many lies and misrepresentations about our elections.”
Even one Republican wasn’t buying it.
Outgoing Rep. Thomas Massie dismissed one of Trump’s central allegations, noting that the voter information Trump referenced is already publicly available.
“This is absurd,” Massie wrote. “Every piece of voter data Trump mentions here, as well as which elections each voter voted in, is readily available in Kentucky for a small fee.”
The speech itself did little to reassure critics. Trump appeared low-energy, read almost entirely from the teleprompter, and spent much of the address rehashing election claims that his own administration’s intelligence officials, and even members of his own election task force, have failed to substantiate.
