Trump's Election Fraud Speech and the Illusion of Proof, Part Two

Donald Trump

In his July 16, 2026 speech about election security, United States President Donald Trump made several startling claims about the nation’s elections. Furthermore, he simultaneously released documents in an attempt to prove them. Among his claims, he asserted that noncitizens are illegally voting: 

“According to the DHS review, state voter rolls and public records, they identified approximately 278,000 non-citizens who are registered to vote in federal elections.” 

As I pointed out in yesterday’s post, Trump’s speech created the illusion that he was proving things that he did not, in fact, prove. Instead of stating the proof during his actual speech, Trump referred listeners to the White House website. Note to readers: when a speaker promises to prove something, but instead refers the audience to an outside source for proof, you need to get suspicious right away. That tactic raises a giant red flag. 

Trump's Election Fraud Speech and the Illusion of Proof, Part One

Anyway, I accordingly browsed the White House website. I found a note, which did not prove election fraud as promised. Instead, it said that the White House was “addressing key areas of election integrity.” Basic government-speak. Typical Deep State hedging. I then looked at the link that said, “Noncitizens on State Voter Rolls.”  Curiously, only one page in that link (and by page, I mean, literally, one printed page) dealt with noncitizens on state voter rolls (the only other page on that link was on a different topic, pointing out that the Chinese government has been accessing American voter rolls, which is apparently legal, albeit extremely disturbing). Here it is. 

White House Document; Click to Enlarge

Thus, now that we have browsed through several confusing links, we finally find Trump’s supposed evidence that 

“OVER 250,000 NON-CITIZENS ARE ILLEGALLY REGISTERED TO VOTE IN JUST THE FOUR STATES FOR WHICH PUBLIC DATA FILES HAVE BEEN REVIEWED.” [italics added]

This page then petulantly lists 10 states (far short of 50 but more than 4, which makes me curious about the White House’s editing team) that have been “proactive” to scan their voter rolls for alien voters. Worse, even if we count all 10 states from the White House chart, the number of non-citizens registered to vote only adds up to 10,716. If that turns out to be true, it is 10,716 too many, but it is nowhere near 250,000, as the headline claims. Now, I am no math genius, but evidently I can out-count the White House’s wizards. 

The document conspiratorially concludes by claiming:  

“There is an undeniable pattern emerging as DHS begins to unravel the horrific damage done by the open border policies of the Biden administration. States that have adopted alien-first policies instead of American-first policies have a disproportionate number of non-citizens on their voter rolls.”  

Okay, as the old hamburger advertisement asked, “where’s the beef?”  

First, where is the valid evidence proving that these thousands of noncitizens are (1) registered to vote as noncitizens and (2) actually voting? A chart, by itself, proves nothing. Since I have been trained in social science research methods, I immediately want to know the methodology by which the chart was created. Unfortunately, that methodology is not given. This matters, for legal actions have claimed that the supposed lists of noncitizen voters include legal immigrants who obtained a driver’s license while non-citizens, but subsequently became naturalized and are therefore now legally allowed to vote. In one such lawsuit, the State of Texas backed down on its claim! Analyzing Texas’ actions, David Becker of the Center for Election Innovation & Research commented that, “Their claims would likely be dismissed [in court] until they could come up with something that actually documents how they got to those numbers.” 

Since the one-page document – the only evidence that Trump presented on this point – fails to address this well-publicized criticism, what, if anything, has been established?  

Second, if there are, indeed, thousands of noncitizens illegally registered to vote, why have these supposedly patriotic, data-driven states not prosecuted them – by the thousands? The evidence does not support Trump’s claim. That is not just a logical gap; it is a logical cavern. 

Trump made a simple, but vital, claim about election security. He presented no evidence in his speech, instead referring listeners to his website. The website provides only pathetic documentation. This reduces his claim to mere political posturing. It was easy for him to make false claims, but making such a claim in a speech does not prove it to be true. The speaker either offers proof or does not offer proof. In this case, Trump did not present the promised proof. Making a wild accusation proves nothing! 

Smoke, mirrors, and misdirection! A magician’s classic tricks. Trump’s speech directed me to a website. I plowed through the website, link after confusing link, only to find that any proof is doubtful. It is easy to make accusations. It is much harder to discover and present proof. It was easy for Trump to make these accusations. I, however, needed to do a lot of work to discover that he had not proven anything. Throwing out a puff of smoke in front of a mirror? That’s easy. Digging into the facts? That requires effort. That, in fact, underlies Trump’s real trick. 

Trump's Speech of January 6, 2021: A "Firehose of Falsehood"

Social science explains why Trump’s trick works. RAND Corporation researchers introduced the concept of the “Firehose of Falsehood.” The idea is that dishonest speakers, like Donald Trump, can spew out vast numbers of false charges. A firehose of false charges. One false charge after another. Their gullible audience doesn’t expect them to prove anything. However, to disprove even one charge is a lot of work. Look at how much effort I needed to create this blog post just to disprove one questionable claim. It’s easy for a speaker to spew out an unsupported accusation, but hard for a careful listener to prove that it’s false. Critical listeners eventually get overwhelmed. Trump’s speech made many claims. He proved none of them. I suspect that most of them are false. Do I, however, want to spend the next week or two parsing the speech, point by point, to prove that every single claim was false? No, of course not. I have other things to do with my life. 

One flaw in Trump’s documentation is absolutely fascinating: although the United States government is stuffed with skilled web designers, Trump’s team made his election documents hard to access and even harder to link. Why? Well, maybe Trump just hired the worst web designers in the government. I wouldn’t doubt that. Or, maybe, he and his team just schemed to make the documents hard to access. I lean toward the former, because of the old slogan that we should never accuse somebody of dishonesty when incompetence explains things perfectly well. Still, who knows? 

I hope, in a future post, to explain the ancient concept of Burden of Proof. Ultimately, Trump’s genius as a rhetorician, and his failure as a leader, is that he asserts things that he cannot prove. His loyal supporters’ biggest weakness may be their gullible eagerness to accept Trump’s dubious, unproven claims. Next time around, when Trump makes outrageous claims, our simple response needs to be: “you made the claim, now you need to prove it!” 

by William D. Harpine

Copyright ©2026 by William D. Harpine

Image of Donald Trump: official portrait, public domain

Image of Homeland Security Document, White House website, public domain

Liz Cheney Used Examples to Remind Us of Our Values in Her Courageous Speech about Trump's False Election Claims

Liz Cheney Giving a Speech

Yesterday, I wrote about Congresswoman Liz Cheney’s courageous May 11, 2021 congressional floor speech, in which she criticized former President Donald Trump’s false claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Let’s now turn to her public speaking technique. In particular, she did not select examples to prove that Trump was wrong. Instead, she expanded the debate to the United States of America’s moral standing.

As I mentioned yesterday, few politicians are motivated by any morality higher than the ballot box. If it helps them win, they’ll say it. In her dramatic speech, Cheney raised the debate to a higher level. Doing so, she indirectly reached out to a national audience rather than to her Republican colleagues. Her thesis: “I have been privileged to see firsthand how powerful and how fragile freedom is.” Her proof: she gave examples of people’s struggle for freedom.

Read: Cheney’s Courageous Speech for Freedom

Cheney’s First Example

Within her speech’s first few seconds, Cheney talked about the devotion of Kenyan voters, who defied armed soldiers so they could come to the polls and vote:

“Mr. Speaker, I have been privileged to see firsthand how powerful and how fragile freedom is. Twenty-eight years ago, I stood outside a polling place, a schoolhouse in Western Kenya. Soldiers had chased away people who were lined up to vote. A few hours later, they came streaming back in, risking further attack, undaunted in their determination to exercise their right to vote.”

Cheney’s Second Example

Indirectly challenging former President Trump’s friendship with Vladimir Putin, Cheney’s next dramatic example talked about Russia’s struggle for freedom. That was not just a struggle against communism, but later against Putin’s kleptocracy:

“In 1992, I sat across the table from a young mayor in Russia, and I listened to him talk of his dream of liberating his nation from communism. Years later, for his dedication to the cause of freedom, Boris Nemtsov was assassinated by Vladimir Putin’s thugs.”

Cheney’s Third Example

Warning that we could forget history’s lessons, Cheney then turned to Poland:

“In Warsaw in 1990, I listened to a young Polish woman tell me that her greatest fear was that people would forget. They would forget what it was like to live under Soviet domination. That they would forget the price of freedom.”

Just as Polish people needed to remember the horrors of Soviet rule, so, Cheney, implied, Americans must take care not to be careless with our freedom. 

In the United States, of course, we face a danger opposite to Poland’s. The United States has never lived under communist domination. Instead, we might take our centuries of constitutional government for granted. Conservatives love to honor our nation’s founders. Unfortunately, conservatives seem less eager to live their political lives according to doctrines like equality, freedom, and constitutional government. Cheney hoped, it seems, that the courage of Kenyan, Russian, and Polish voters would inspire Americans to treasure our constitutional republic.


Who Was Cheney’s Audience?

In their influential book about rhetoric, Traité de l'argumentation: La nouvelle rhétorique [Treatise on Argumentation: The New Rhetoric], Belgian philosophers Chaïm Perlman and Lucie Olbrechts-Tyteca made the remarkable claim that the audience is a construct in the mind of the speaker. The important audience, especially in the media age, is not necessarily the small group of people in the room. Cheney, obviously knowing that the Republican Party had turned against her, reached out instead to the larger public. Those larger audiences could watch her speech on the news or read about it on the Web. Will the Republican voting base hear her ideas? Will her appeals reach the larger American public?

Perhaps only time will answer those questions. Notable, however, is that all but one Republican member of Congress in the chamber walked out before she spoke. They chose to ignore what she would say. By walking out, maybe they wanted to show that they disapproved of her integrity. Maybe they were ashamed to know that she was a better person than they were. We may never know.

Are Republican voters listening? Only time will tell, but Cheney tried to elevate the discourse beyond Trump’s election lies. Instead, she raised the larger question of American values. That is going to be a tough sell in the conspiracy theory-infested regions of red-state America.


Why Does Cheney’s Speech Matter?

Cheney’s examples warned us that America’s time-tested system of government is more fragile than we might think. On January 6, 2021, violent insurrectionists tried to stop the election’s certification, while more than 100 Republican members of Congress refused to certify an obviously accurate count of the Electoral College’s votes. The insurrectionists’ simple but crude goal was that the vote didn’t count until Congress said it counted. President Trump repeatedly egged them on. The disorganized, poorly-led mob came perilously close to sabotaging the tally. Liz Cheney was removed from her leadership position precisely because she opposed that sabotage.

Is Cheney right? Can the American experiment fail? Of course. Germany in 1933 was wracked by economic and political disaster, but it was also a world-recognized center of industrial power, religion, philosophy, art, and music. Germany was the homeland of Beethoven, Kant, and Goethe. Adolf Hitler’s political base consisted of conservative Christians in southern Germany. He never gained a majority of the vote, and became Chancellor of Germany by manipulating the political system. Does any of that sound familiar? If totalitarian government could seize control of Germany, then, yes, it can happen in the United States.

Read: Hitler and Christian Nationalism 

Back to Cheney’s examples: unlike most conservative speakers, she told no stories about history’s American heroes. Instead, she talked about people in other nations who valued the freedom that we take for granted. Indeed, I am reminded of a statement that Ronald Reagan made many years ago: “If we lose freedom here, there's no place to escape to. This is the last stand on earth.”

Cheney’s examples did not prove her point in a logical manner. Instead, she encouraged her audience to think in broad terms, to remember the United States’ founding values, to recognize that winning elections is not the be-all and end-all of political life. I do not expect Cheney’s speech to have much effect on American politics over the next few years. Maybe, given enough years, her message will finally sink into our national conscience. She asked for us to return to American Revolutionary ideals. She spoke to people’s hearts. As usual, only people with open hearts will hear her.



Technical notes: Perlman and Olbrechts-Tyteca’s book, which presents an innovative, and now widely-accepted, theory of audiences, is available in an excellent English translation under the title, The New Rhetoric: A Treatise in Argumentation. Highly recommended to anyone who wants to understand persuasion. My friend Ray Dearin wrote a fine summary and analysis of Perlman’s philosophy of rhetoric, which is available for paid download. Most good libraries can probably get a copy for free. 

Most printed texts of this speech are based on Cheney's draft. I referred to that draft, of course, but also to the verbatim transcript on Rev.com. Speakers often improvise during delivery. 

Image: Liz Cheney's Congressional Website

Liz Cheney's Courageous Speech Asking Republicans to Reject Trump's False Election Claims

Liz Cheney, US Congress

Never take freedom for granted.

In a dramatic speech, Wyoming congressional representative Liz Cheney told Congress yesterday that the Republican Party needed to reject former President Donald Trump’s false claim that the 2020 election was stolen from him by voter fraud.

Today, the Republican caucus removed her from her leadership role by voice vote: literally shouting down her insistence that the Republican Party should stand for truth. Good public speaking is not just a matter of skill; no, good public speaking requires integrity.

Acts of political courage like Cheney's are remarkably few and far between. Young Senator John Kennedy’s 1956 best-selling book Profiles in Courage summarizes courageous acts of eight United States senators who risked their political careers by taking unpopular political positions. It’s often noted that Kennedy’s book is short because politicians rarely exhibit courage. Most politicians are simple, amoral creatures who never think past next week's opinion polls. Most are willing to take any position, no matter how evil, that they think will help them get elected. This makes Cheney’s speech, which insisted that patriotism matters more than politics, all the more remarkable.

In fact, Cheney stated that theme in her very first sentence: “Tonight I rise to discuss freedom and our constitutional duty to protect it. Mr. Speaker, I have been privileged to see firsthand how powerful and how fragile freedom is.”

Indeed, Americans so often take freedom and greatness for granted. This sometimes makes us think that anything our nation does is automatically great. However, Cheney told Congress – and, more importantly, the American people – that American freedom is both fragile and endangered. She then warned that the nation’s freedom and greatness depend on responding to threats:

“God has blessed America, Mr. Speaker, but our freedom only survives if we protect it, if we honor our oath, taken before God in this chamber, to support and defend the Constitution, if we recognize threats to freedom when they arise.”

It required great intrepidity for Cheney to then explain that the greatest threat to American freedom came from the leader of her own political party. Former President Trump has repeatedly, and falsely, stated that the 2020 election was stolen from him. Conservative media, including commentators on Fox News, Newsmax, and so forth, have repeated this thoroughly-discredited claim. Since our constitutional republic depends entirely on the people’s faith in the system, Cheney warned that Trump’s behavior poses a unique and terrible danger:

“Today we face a threat America has never seen before. A former president, who provoked a violent attack on this Capitol in an effort to steal the election, has resumed his aggressive effort to convince Americans that the election was stolen from him. He risks inciting further violence.

“Millions of Americans have been misled by the former President. They have heard only his words, but not the truth, as he continues to undermine our democratic process, sowing seeds of doubt about whether democracy really works at all."

There is much wisdom in her simple phrase, “They have heard only his words, but not the truth.” We’ll return to that in a minute.

Cheney noted, of course, that the courts and the Department of Justice had universally rejected Trump’s false claims. She then called her party to its constitutional duty: “This is not about policy. This is not about partisanship. This is about our duty as Americans.”

She concluded her speech by once again calling on people to rise above party to defend the country:

“Ultimately, Mr. Speaker, this is at the heart of what our oath requires—that we love our country more [than life]. That we love her so much we will stand above politics to defend her. That we will do everything in our power to protect our constitution and our freedom -- paid for by the blood of so many. . . . That is our duty.”

As she gave this speech, Cheney – who is a most astute politician – knew perfectly well that the Republican caucus would soon remove her from her leadership role and that she would become a pariah in her own party.

People can speculate as to Cheney’s political future. If the Trump cult – no other word describes it – collapses, this does not mean that his supporters will ever forgive her. Germany rejected the Nazi Party after World War II, but never fully forgave Oskar Schindler for rescuing Jews from the Holocaust. He got death threats for years. I think that most Republicans know that Cheney is right, but that doesn’t mean they will welcome her again. I’ve heard speculation that Cheney may want to establish her own party or run for president. Neither seems likely.

Read: Senator Jeff Flake Spoke against Trump's Falsehoods

Read: Reagan versus Trump, Unifier versus Divider

Nevertheless, Liz Cheney gave a speech for the ages. Her speech will land in history books. Many speech students will study this speech, write papers about it, and let it inspire them. Other people, although they may stay quiet, will seethe in anger every time they think about what Cheney said yesterday.

In part, Republicans, desperate to remain in power, have shown themselves eager to discard every principle that they ever claimed to believe. Many Republicans, I suspect, quietly know that Trump has shamed them. Instead, however, of turning aside from their dark path, they will simply resent Cheney for being better than they are.

When she made her principled stand, Liz Cheney said that country mattered more than party. Her party, the once-great party of Lincoln, Grant, McKinley, and Eisenhower, rejected her. Heaven help us.



P.S.: Let’s return to Cheney’s statement that, “They have heard only his words, but not the truth.” For many Republican voters, this is probably true. We are long past the point when most people informed themselves by reading newspapers or listening to newscasters like David Brinkley or Walter Cronkite, who delivered carefully-verified reports with voices like heavenly thunder. Today, most conservatives get their news from Fox News, Newsmax, talk radio, or even less reputable sources. On the rare occasions that Fox' Chris Wallace tries to speak truthfully, viewers can tune him out, knowing that an irresponsible pundit will soon come on the air. I suspect that many Republicans, most of whom believe President Trump’s false claims that the election was stolen, have literally never heard the conclusive evidence that this is false. That is because they only listen to news media that tell them what they want to hear. To understand this bizarre phenomenon, look at communication professors Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Joseph N. Capella’s remarkable book, Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment.

Post updated May 13, 2021 to incorporate corrections based on the verbatim transcript published by rev.com. (She said Mr. Speaker, not Madam Speaker,  in the live speech, due to a Speaker Pro Tem presiding,)