President Donald Trump The highly publicized speech promising major revelations about interference in the 2020 election fell short. On Thursday night, the president made sweeping claims about Chinese interference and a “deep state” cover-up, and repeated debunked claims about non-citizen voting. He pointed to a document posted on the White House website as evidence, although the files contained no evidence to support his claims.

For Trump’s loyal army of supporters, this didn’t matter. “This is a big coup by President Trump,” election denier Patrick Byrne told school shooting conspiracy theorist Alex Jones moments after finishing the speech, adding, “This is bigger than if they released the JFK files.” (Byrne did not mention that the Trump administration released the JFK files last year.)

Jones added during the broadcast: “The deep state is shitting a brick right now.”

Conspiracy theorists claimed that the speech would provide the basis for Trump to sign into law the Insurrection Act, a law that could allow the president to deploy the military to the polls in November, although the extent of the military’s legal capabilities in a situation like this remains unclear.

Lara Logan, a former CBS news reporter who has become a star in the election denial community, called the speech “a reckoning” and wrote in X that it was “the opening salvo in a much larger plan.”

That plan, according to many election deniers, has already seen Trump pressure Congress to pass the anti-voting SAVE America Act and, if that fails, invoke even greater powers.

“Trump has the optics to do whatever is necessary to secure the 2026 midterm elections, including invoking the Insurrection Act to secure polling places with military and federal forces,” a member of the election denial group called Sarasota Patriots wrote on Telegram.

“After Trump demonstrates that he exercised every option before taking the Executive route, he will invoke the Insurrection Act and save the Republic,” Jacob Creech, a popular conspiracy theorist known online as WarClandestine, wrote in X.

Wendy Rogers, Arizona state senator and well-known election conspiracy theorist, shared Creech’s post and wrote: “This is what’s called ‘establishing the predicate’ and it’s EXACTLY what will happen. You’re seeing it in REAL TIME.”

Michael Flynn, the disgraced former national security adviser who has been at the center of the election denial movement, called for immediate arrests, without citing any evidence beyond Trump’s words. “The first-term directors of the CIA and NSA should be immediately arrested for treason,” Flynn wrote in X.

This is exactly what experts who have closely followed the election denial movement expected.

“Tonight, the White House used a worn-out playbook: cherry-picked intelligence and an avalanche of crude, debunked reporting, disguised as national security revelations, to construct a pretext for illegal actions,” says Alexandra Chandler, director of impact programs at the nonprofit Protect Democracy, who worked in the intelligence community for 13 years. “This wasn’t about 2020 or national security. It was about delegating the foot soldiers who will be asked to deny the 2026 results if their side loses in November.”

The publication of the speech and document generated anger from election officials and voting experts. “This is all a lie,” Nevada Secretary of State Cisco Aguilar wrote in a statement emailed to WIRED. Maryland Congressman Jamie Raskin, a former House impeachment manager, told Zeteo that Trump’s speech was “gibberish,” “nonsense” and “almost discredits himself.”

But possibly the most damning condemnation of all came from within the Trump administration. John Solomon, the conservative journalist known for challenging the narrative about Trump’s ties to Russia, was recently appointed to a position inside the White House to review documents that the administration said were related to election interference. (While Trump did not mention Russia’s role in election interference in his speech, Russia was cited in documents released by the White House in an assessment that Russia was the only country that attempted to meddle in the 2020 US election, targeting former President Joe Biden.)