Trump to give primetime speech on elections as sources say he'll raise allegations about China

• What: President Trump speaks at the White House
• Date: Thursday, July 16, 2026  
• Time: 9 p.m. ET
• Location: Washington, D.C.
• Online stream: Live on CBS News in the video player above and on your mobile or streaming device
• A team of CBS News correspondents and contributors will be providing analysis and context following the president's remarks.

Mr. Trump has made the SAVE America Act his top legislative priority. The president and his allies in Congress have held other items on the GOP's agenda hostage over Senate Republicans' inability to pass the voting regulations bill. 

The bill would implement strict new requirements for registering to vote and casting ballots, which critics have warned would disenfranchise millions of eligible voters. 

The SAVE America Act would require voters to show proof in person of U.S. citizenship, like a passport or birth certificate, to register to vote in federal elections. The measure also has a requirement that voters show a photo ID to cast a ballot. The photo ID must also contain proof of citizenship, according to the measure.

The House has passed various versions of the legislation and has vowed to attach it to other must-pass measures before sending them to the Senate. However, the voting regulations bill lacks even a simple majority of support in the upper chamber. 

Mr. Trump also wants to add other Republican priorities to the measure, like bans on mail-in voting and transgender athletes' participation in women's sports. 

Republicans have touted the measure as a reasonable way to prevent noncitizens from casting ballots, though instances of noncitizens voting are exceedingly rare.

When U.S. intelligence agencies look at attempts by foreign countries to meddle in elections, they draw a distinction between "election influence" and "election interference."

Election influence covers attempts by foreign governments to affect who voters decide to vote for, including by promoting or denigrating certain candidates, spreading false claims or sowing distrust. Election interference includes attempts to alter technical parts of the election process, like the casting of ballots, the vote-counting process or voter registrations.

In early 2021, the National Intelligence Council found that several countries attempted to influence the 2020 race without interfering in election processes. Russia tried to undermine the Biden campaign, Iran tried to undermine the Trump campaign, and Venezuela, Hezbollah and Cuba may have tried some smaller-scale strategies to denigrate Mr. Trump.

But the National Intelligence Council found "no indications" that foreign countries "attempted to alter any technical aspect of the voting process" during the 2020 election, including ballot-casting, vote-counting or registrations. 

Experts have long argued it would be extremely difficult for anybody to pull off election interference at a large scale since U.S. elections are heavily decentralized, with thousands of counties and cities responsible for registering voters, running polling places and counting votes.

"We assess that it would be difficult for a foreign actor to manipulate election processes at scale without detection by intelligence collection on the actors themselves, through physical and cyber security monitoring around voting systems across the country, or in post-election audits," the National Intelligence Council said in a 2021 report.

The Justice Department and Department of Homeland Security also found in 2021 that there was "no evidence that any foreign government-affiliated actor prevented voting, changed votes, or disrupted the ability to tally votes or to transmit election results in a timely manner."

The question of China's involvement in the 2020 election has been the topic of some debate — but U.S. intelligence agencies have said China didn't try to interfere in the election on a technical level.

In early 2021, most of the U.S. intelligence community assessed that China did not try to influence the outcome of the election, with Beijing deciding neither a Biden nor a Trump victory was "advantageous enough for China to risk getting caught meddling." While China has tried to influence U.S. politics to promote its view of the world, it stayed on the sidelines of the 2020 race, according to a March 2021 report by the National Intelligence Council.

But the report notes a "minority view" from the National Intelligence Officer for Cyber, who believed China did take at least some steps to "undermine" the Trump campaign, largely through social media posts, official statements and other influence campaigns.

However, the entire intelligence community — including the National Intelligence Officer for Cyber — agreed that China did not "interfere with election infrastructure, including vote tabulation or the transmission of election results."

Separately, the National Intelligence Officer for Cyber found in April 2020 that Chinese intelligence "analyzed multiple U.S. states' … election voter registration data," according to a report that was declassified in 2022 but is heavily redacted. The goal was to "conduct public opinion analysis on the 2020 U.S. general election."

It isn't clear how China accessed the voter data or how sensitive it was. In many states, voter registration information is available to the public or can be purchased, and if China obtained voter data, it doesn't mean election processes were impacted.

President Trump has never acknowledged that he lost to Joe Biden in 2020, and has long insisted the election was riven with fraud — though no evidence has emerged of fraud on a scale necessary to change the outcome of the election.

Shortly after the election, the Trump campaign and its allies filed dozens of lawsuits challenging votes in virtually every swing state, almost all of which were rejected. Then-Attorney General William Barr also said prosecutors and FBI agents didn't find evidence of widespread fraud.

The U.S. Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency called the 2020 election "the most secure in American history" and noted: "There is no evidence that any voting system deleted or lost votes, changed votes, or was in any way compromised."

Several key states also conducted their own audits and investigations in the years following the 2020 election, and did not uncover evidence of sweeping voter fraud.