Surprise, Surprise: Friday Morning Network Shows Hated Trump’s Election Integrity Address

In a not-at-all-shocking development, the “Big Three” of ABC, CBS, and NBC registered their displeasure with President Trump’s Thursday night address about election integrity, ranging from rebuttals of the President’s claims to outright anger.

ABC’s Good Morning America was enraged, using heated rhetoric instead of fact-checking. Co-host and former Clinton official George Stephanopoulos declared in an opening tease Trump’s goal was “to sow doubt about the upcoming midterm elections.”

Stephanopoulos was even more condescending in the opening to Trump-hating correspondent Rachel Scott’s report: “Now to President Trump’s primetime address last night, where he continued his campaign to cast doubt on the 2020 election he lost, and the 2026 midterms he fears losing. He did it by making a series of misleading claims and citing dated intelligence that failed to demonstrate any votes were actually compromised.”

Scott pointed out that “Republicans…were hoping the President would focus on immigration, on the economy, issues they believe will be important to voters this midterm election, but instead, the President came…to talk about an election that he lost six years ago, using unfounded claims to demand sweeping changes ahead of the midterms.”

She also adopted the line about throwing the 2026 midterms into chaos, adding Trump made “extraordinary and vague claims that officials he appointed in his first administration were part of a cover-up to keep information about foreign interference and election fraud away from him.”

Scott continued this pattern of dismissing Trump’s claims without providing counterpoints before moving to trash the SAVE America Act because it’d “severely restrict mail-in voting” (click “expand”):

SCOTT: Trump lost in 2020 by seven million votes. He lost the Electoral College, and lost more than 60 court cases challenging the election, some in front of judges he appointed, and there’s no evidence of widespread voter fraud, something his own attorney general at the time acknowledged. Still, the President has been fixated on unfounded claims of voter fraud, demanding Congress pass the SAVE America Act, a sweeping voter ID bill, alleging his administration found more than 275,000 non-citizens on the voting rolls. But at no point did the President prove people cast ballots who shouldn’t have. Election officials across the country quickly responding.

(….)

SCOTT: Democrats warning that President Trump is laying the groundwork for challenging future election results.

CONGRESSMAN JIM HIMES (D-CT): He’s laying the foundation to be able to tell America after Election Day that the election was corrupt and therefore should not be respected.

SCOTT: We just got word from both China and Russia. They are rejecting the claims that the President made last night. As he closed his speech, he demanded that Republicans on Capitol Hill passed the SAVE America Act. This is his voter ID bill, which would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. It would also severely restrict mail-in voting, but the President does not have the votes to get this through Congress. And what’s more, that bill does nothing to address what the President spent most of his time focused on last night: These allegations of foreign election interference, which again, his own intelligence agencies at the time said was just simply not true[.]

All told, their report ran for three minutes and 27 seconds

CBS Mornings and NBC’s Today took a different approach. While they still railed against the speech, they both played multiple clips of the President’s speech and elaborated with their respective arguments about why he was wrong.

On NBC, co-host Craig Melvin said in a tease that “Trump us[ed] a rare primetime address to issue new warnings about election security ahead of the midterms…repeating false claims about widespread fraud and interference in 2020, and launching a new campaign against voting by mail.”

Saturday co-host Laura Jarrett deployed similar verbiage in the first hour report: “[R]eaction pouring in to President Trump's rare primetime address to the nation, using his speech to revive false claims about the 2020 election and raising questions about election integrity ahead of the midterms this November.”

Senior White House correspondent Gabe Gutierrez said Trump outlined “a wide-ranging conspiracy theory” about 2020, and while he “has questioned election integrity before, but these claims are taking on new urgency with the midterms less than four months away.”

“The White House posting newly declassified, but heavily redacted documents,” he added.

Gutierrez let Trump speak and interspersed it with retorts, explaining he “describ[ed] efforts by China to access U.S. voter rolls, though much of that information is publicly available.”

After airing Trump’s allegation that the Deep State “worked to actively suppress and downplay information about the extent of China's sinister election meddling,” Gutierrez countered on this point as well as another Trump bombshell about non-citizens on voter rolls (click “expand”):

GUTIERREZ: But one of the documents released overnight refers to Chinese efforts to target Joe Biden’s campaign, and, for years, U.S. intelligence assessments have shown that American voting systems have been a target of foreign adversaries. Years of recounts, audits, lawsuits, and reviews have not found evidence of enough fraud to overturn Trump’s 2020 loss.

TRUMP: Our purpose in disclosing this information is not to weaken confidence in elections, but to earn that confidence by confronting vulnerabilities and correcting them very, very quickly.

GUTIRREZ: The President also pointing to a review of state voter rolls and public records by the Department of Homeland Security.

TRUMP: They identified approximately 278,000 noncitizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.

GUTIERREZ: But election experts say the database that may have been used for that analysis often flags newly naturalized citizens as non-citizen voters.

Gutierrez concluded in part with Trump calling on Congress to pass the SAVE America Act, dubbing it “sweeping legislation…that would require voter I.D. and proof of citizenship,” with critics “concern[ed] it would make it harder for Americans to vote.”

To further emphasize how they felt about all this, NBC spent five minutes and 31 seconds on the speech, including Gutierrez returning in the second hour to rehash many of the same points.

Just as CBS was the lone network to dedicate a full hour Thursday night to the speech and carry most of it without interruption, CBS Mornings had the most coverage with eight minutes and three seconds.

Fill-in co-host Jo-Ling Kent said Trump “billed his primetime speech last night as a really big news on the subject of election integrity,” and went onto include “accus[ing] China of trying to collect voter data and repeated disproven claims about voting by noncitizens.”

“Democrats fear it’s part of an effort to undermine confidence in elections with the midterms just months away,” she continued.

Senior White House correspondent Weijia Jiang began by telling viewers: “Trump used his remarks last night to make exaggerated and, at times, unsubstantiated claims about election security, all while he is calling on Congress to pass a voting regulations bill ahead of the midterm elections.”

She reiterated the President “doubled down on unsubstantiated claims the 2020 presidential election, which he lost, was rigged, and he accused China of accessing voter data,” even though “[m]ost of that information is publicly available and Trump did not say how or if Beijing used it, though the U.S. intelligence community assessed in 2021 with high confidence that China did not try to influence the outcome of the 2020 election.”

Jiang also addressed more claims, both airing Trump as well as her rebuttals (click “expand”):

JIANG: Trump accused the deep state of covering up the truth.

TRUMP: Those responsible for sounding the alarm instead kept the information secret and hidden.

JIANG: However, another intelligence assessment from April 2020 during the first Trump administration did raise the alarm that Chinese officials had “analyzed” bulk voter registration data from “multiple U.S. states” and this.

TRUMP: Hundreds of thousands of citizens and dead people are active on the voter rolls.

JIANG: The President raised concern about undocumented voters voting – without evidence to back it up – that DHS found 278,000 noncitizens on voting rolls nationwide and used that claim again to push lawmakers to pass a voting regulations bill that would establish national voter ID, proof of citizenship standards, and dramatically curb mail-in voting.

(….)

JIANG: Democrats warn Trump is using the past to sow doubts about the upcoming midterm elections.

SENATOR JON OSSOFF (D-GA): He is laying the groundwork for a potential challenge to the result, another bad-faith challenge.

As with NBC’s Gutierrez, CBS’s Jiang returned in the second hour for a truncated report.

Unlike NBC, though, they had a second segment in the first hour as they brought in supposedly CBS News contributor David Becker of the supposedly “non-partisan” Center for Election Innovation and Research.

Kent asked him to answer “[w]hy do you think – why did the President give this primetime address largely discussing debunked claims about election integrity” at a time when “[t]here is a lot going on in the country” with “inflation” and “wars.”

“I can’t really answer that…[I]f you look at the evidence that…this administration has compiled over 18 months in total control of the federal government…looking for evidence that would justify or support the false claims that the 2020 election was stolen. In fact, what was released last night largely confirmed that that election was secure. It confirmed that there was no alteration of the vote totals,” he replied.

Kent also asked him to share “the reality” about China obtaining U.S. voter data (click “expand”):

KENT: David, I want to ask you about how the President has claimed that China has collected the voter data of 220 million Americans. Should we be worried here? What is the reality?

BECKER: The reality, as you just heard, is voter data is public. Every state allows for public versions of the voter data to be available. The parties use it. The candidates use it for outreach, for voter engagement. It’s also good for people who want our elections to have integrity because voter lists can be checked ahead of time to see if there are any problems with them, perhaps to challenge individual voters who might not be eligible, who might have moved away, et cetera. So, every state has this publicly. There are states like Ohio and North Carolina that literally have it up on the web right now. You can go and find that if you just Google it, it’s been long known that China is vacuuming up as much data on Americans as possible. This is probably some of the easiest data, and the least concerning data they could possibly have. There’s no personal identifiable information in this. This is just the public files, and nothing that we heard last night changes that. No one should be concerned about that.

Only at the end of the segment did he concede we should “always” be “improving” and “hav[ing] these discussions about how to improve our election system” in the face of so many formidable adversaries.

To see the relevant transcripts from July 17, click here (for ABC), here (for CBS), and here (for NBC).