Trump Rehashes Election Fraud Claims, Politics Of Trump's Speech, Texas Flooding

Steve Inskeep

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Me too.

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Let's get to the news.

Miles Parks

Let's get to the show.

Layla Fadel

President Trump said he was releasing new evidence of widespread election fraud in his speech last night.

Steve Inskeep

But experts who reviewed the documents say there's nothing new, just a rehash of old false claims about the 2020 election.

Layla Fadel

Trump lost Jaime Martinez. That's Layla Fadel. And this is up first from NPR News. The president also used his primetime address to push his election safety bill, which would require proof of citizenship to vote. With Trump's approval numbers at their lowest and midterms approaching, why is he choosing now to push a bill that doesn't have the numbers in Congress?

Steve Inskeep

And severe flooding hit Texas Hill country last year. Floods there killed more than 130 people. This time, new warning sirens and hard lessons may have saved lives. Stay with us. We'll give you the news you need to start your day.

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Steve Inskeep

President Trump and his team have teased a bombshell announcement on Election integrity.

Layla Fadel

Trump gave a primetime address on it last night. But election experts say the speech and the newly unclassified documents that came with it provided no new evidence of widespread fraud. Mostly, it was a rehash of facts and claims about America's voting system that were already known.

Steve Inskeep

NPR voting correspondent Miles Parks has been up all night going through those documents, and he joins me now to talk through it. Hi, Miles.

Miles Parks

Hey, good morning.

Steve Inskeep

Good morning. Okay, so the president has been making false claims for almost six years now that the election he lost in 2020 was rigged. Last night, he gave a speech about voting integrity. Was it more of the same?

Miles Parks

It was. I mean, he hit on a bunch of the themes that will sound really familiar to anyone who's heard the President over the last few years. The idea that voting machines can't be trusted, the idea that non citizens are voting en masse in American elections, shadowy schemes by foreign governments to try to influence voting, that sort of thing. But our team at NPR started looking through all of these documents that the White House published, and it's not really clear what is actually new here that impacts our understanding of the security of America's elections. I talked with Adrian Fontes after the speech. He's Arizona's top voting official. He's a Democrat. Here's how he described it.

Steve Inskeep

I kind of felt a little bit cheated.

Miles Parks

I was expecting some kind of delicious bombshell that we might be able to investigate. But instead I got a rehash of the same grievance. Fontes was struck by how closely all these classified documents aligned with what was already public about the 2020 election.

Steve Inskeep

So tell us a little bit more, like the details, what's actually in these documents?

Miles Parks

So, I mean, take the idea about America's voting systems being vulnerable to hacking, for instance. The President said Americans were blatantly lied to about the security of our election infrastructure. They're vulnerable, referring to the machines, and they're easily compromised. But the documents released really just lay out concerns with voting equipment that were already known.

Steve Inskeep

Like what?

Miles Parks

So in some places, it's just really old. Election administration is known to be chronically underfunded, and for the past 10 years, American adversaries have targeted it. In some cases, that's looked like actually trying to break into registration systems. In other cases, it's trying to influence American voters online. But there's no evidence anyone has ever actually changed votes. That is a critical distinction. I was talking about that with Susan Greenhalgh at the advocacy group Free Speech for People. For years, she has worked to shine A light on some of the same problems that Trump is now focusing on.

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Two things can be true at the same time.

Steve Inskeep

That we have ignored vulnerabilities in our voting systems for a long time.

Miles Parks

And.

Steve Inskeep

And there is no evidence that the election was rigged in 2020.

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And everything that has been put forth

Steve Inskeep

purporting to provide that evidence always falls

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apart like a cheap suit.

Miles Parks

You know, even with those vulnerabilities, the bottom line is that almost everyone in the United States votes on a paper ballot. And those paper ballots after the 2020 election were investigated and audited over and over again, and widespread fraud was never found.

Steve Inskeep

Now, another topic that came up a lot was China. The president said the country had amassed hundreds of millions of voter records and undermine his election campaign in 2020. Is that true?

Miles Parks

It is, but it's also not really news. You know, at the time in 2020, the intelligence community publicly said that China preferred Joe Biden as a candidate, although there were some public disagreements on what the country was actually willing to do in terms of pushing that preference. And on the voter data, this is actually a great example of something that sounds really scary, but actually didn't shock people who work in elections. A lot of voter roll data is already public and easily accessible. And it was publicly known that China has long been interested in accumulating information on American voters and candidates. David Becker of the center for Election Innovation and Research says that sort of activity just has no effect on actual votes. Having the voter data itself doesn't allow you to change anything. I can have my kids class list, but that doesn't mean I can change the grades of everybody in the class. Still, the president and his allies are using this as justification to push for big changes to the voting process. And experts like Becker expect to see more of that as the midterms get closer.

Steve Inskeep

NPR's Miles Parks, thank you for that reporting.

Miles Parks

Miles, thank you.

Steve Inskeep

There are also the politics of President Trump's speech.

Layla Fadel

The president continues to face low approval. The war in Iran is ramping back up, and economic conditions are not really improving.

Steve Inskeep

Here to walk us through those politics is NPR senior political correspondent Tamara Keith. Hi, Tam.

Tamara Keith

Good morning.

Steve Inskeep

Good morning. Why is the president renewing his claims that US Elections are not secure or that the system lacks integrity?

Tamara Keith

President Trump has questioned the fairness of every election going back at least to 2016, an election he won. Now we're in another election year. The courts have blocked his executive actions to change election administration, and he has tried every lever he can to push Congress to pass the Save America act. Which would, among other things, require proof of citizenship to vote. He even recently refused to sign a big popular bipartisan bill addressing the cost of housing in, quote, protest about the Save America Act. That didn't move the needle. So last night, he commanded the national airwaves in a way that only a president can to once again push for it.

Steve Inskeep

Addressing this crisis of election security.

Miles Parks

Demands that Congress must pass the Save America Act. How easy is that to do?

Steve Inskeep

Unless you want to cheat. The only reason you wouldn't do it is you want to cheat. Okay, that's the president making that claim, doing a call to action. How likely is that to affect the Save America Act's chances of passage?

Tamara Keith

It doesn't have the vote it needs to pass in the Senate. Yes, Republicans control that chamber, but it can't get past a filibuster without Democratic votes. And, and even if Republicans tried procedural moves to get around the filibuster, it doesn't look like there's enough Republican support to pass this either. And here's the thing. This is an election year, and there are a lot of Republicans on the ballot who would much rather focus on the issue voters repeatedly say is most important to them, the cost of living.

Steve Inskeep

Did the President speak to those affordability concerns?

Tamara Keith

Very briefly. He went through sort of our greatest hits reel of the first 18 months back in office. No tax on tips, a blockbuster stock market. There was a brief mention of a recent inflation report that showed some improvement. He said very little about the war with Iran, which has driven up prices. And if you just step back here, it's remarkable. If you told me the President was going to give an address to the nation from the White House this week, a week where the Iran ceasefire broke down and he has ordered nightly bombing raids on Iranian targets. The assumption would be that he needed to address this escalation, but that is not what he did.

Steve Inskeep

Wow. Should we expect Trump to keep talking about this elections?

Tamara Keith

Yes. I mean, he's still talking about 2020. The phrase he used in that clip we played, unless you want to cheat. Is the President of the United States laying the groundwork to say that the elections this fall, where Republicans are widely expected to take losses, won't be fair. He talked a lot about vulnerabilities in the system, but didn't offer any proof that they'd been exploited. The but it doesn't take finding a smoking gun to sow doubts and potentially depress voter turnout. And that might be self defeating. Trump needs voters who often sit out midterms but show up for him to vote in big numbers for Republican members of Congress not named Trump.

Steve Inskeep

NPR's Tamara Keith, thank you so much for that reporting.

Tamara Keith

You're welcome.

Steve Inskeep

At least two people have died and hundreds have been rescued in catastrophic flooding in Texas this week.

Layla Fadel

This is the second year in a row that Texas hill country has flooded. Just over A year ago, 130 people died over the 4th of July weekend, including children and counselors from a summer camp.

Steve Inskeep

Chelsea Zhu is a reporter with member station KUT in Austin, and she joins me now. Good morning, Chelsea.

Chelsea Zhu

Good morning.

Steve Inskeep

So tell us about what's been going on across the state.

Chelsea Zhu

So the major flooding we've seen has been a culmination of several days of very heavy rain across large parts of Texas, especially the south central region. Some storms have been slow moving, dropping heavy rain in some of the same areas that have already seen a lot of rain in the days before, which has made flooding more likely. Some towns have seen as much as 20 inches of rain or more since the start of the week. The weather has also been unpredictable. There was even a tornado that touched down in San Antonio on Wednesday. Here's what Chief Nim Kidd with the Texas Division of Emergency Management had to say yesterday as the state prepared for another round of storms.

Miles Parks

The way that this weather pattern is setting up is difficult for the models that the meteorologists use to tell us exactly where it's going to fall and exactly how much it's going to fall.

Steve Inskeep

Chelsea, there's been more rain this year than last year, but we have fortunately seen fewer deaths. What's different?

Chelsea Zhu

It's hard to say for sure right now since we're still assessing the damage, but a few different things could contribute to that. One is, again, that it's been a full week of rain for some of these places that has built up to this severe flooding. So people have been able to see this develop over days. I also think people across the state are more aware of the risks. After the deadly floods last year, people might be paying more attention to severe weather alerts when they're sent out and things like shelter in place or evacuation orders. And after last year, Texas lawmakers also made it a priority to pass flood safety measures, some of which are already in effect. That includes new flood warning sirens in the region and updated emergency plans for summer camps.

Steve Inskeep

What are the people in flooded areas saying about their experiences?

Chelsea Zhu

Many of my colleagues went out yesterday talking to people during the flooding, and it was inevitable that last year's flooding was front and center in people's minds. Here's Claudio Castillo. He says he's lived in the hill country for most of his life. In the tape, you can hear the Guadalupe river rushing in the background.

Tamara Keith

It's sad. It's just like a desert.

Steve Inskeep

It hits you.

Miles Parks

You know, it hits you pretty hard, especially when you go right by Camp Mystic. You know, something happened pretty bad there.

Chelsea Zhu

He's talking about the girls summer camp where 25 campers and two counselors died in the flooding last year. He also mentioned that it feels like flooding has been happening more often, which is true at a broader level because of climate change, which scientists say has made record breaking rain much more in the US and has contributed to more frequent and severe flooding. That said, as we get to the end of the week, the National Weather Service is forecasting that the heavy rain will start to move out of these flooded areas. So we may be transitioning from search and rescue to recovery over the next couple of days.

Steve Inskeep

Chelsea Zhu is a reporter with member station KUT in Austin. Thank you, Chelsea.

Chelsea Zhu

Thank you.

Steve Inskeep

And that's up first for Friday, July 17th, 17th.

Layla Fadel

I'm Layla Faudel and Amy Martinez. Today's episode of up first was edited by Ben Swayze, Megan Pratts, Acacia Squires, Mohammed Albardisi and Alice Wolfley was produced by Ziad Buch and Nia Dumas. Our director is Christopher Thomas. We get engineering support from Anisha Hynes. Our technical director is Carly Strange, and our executive producer is Jay Shaylor. Join us again on Monday.

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