Nets Kowtow to AOC, Refuse to Air Trump Speech but Offer Rebuttals

Jorge Bonilla
July 17th, 2026 1:25 AM

Text to Speech

00:00 00:00
Font Size

President Trump’s address to the nation on election interference and other matters did not air on the principal broadcast networks, who deliberately sought to prevent their viewers from hearing whatever Trump had to say. However, they all offered rebuttals.

The speech was censored per the request of socialist Congresswoman Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Per People Magazine:

On Tuesday, Ocasio-Cortez was asked by Pablo Manríquez, a reporter for Migrant Insider and the liberal outlet MeidasTouch, whether U.S. news networks should air the President’s address. 

“I don’t think we should be contributing to any platforming of lies about our elections,” the New York Democrat and possible 2028 Presidential contender said. “Many of these outlets often receive transcripts, and I think we have an ethical obligation not to air things that undermine our election and are not rooted in evidence and fact.”

“Of course, it depends on the contents of this speech, but that’s my take on it,” the 36-year-old congresswoman added.

And the networks largely complied.  ABC and NBC refused to air the speech, breaking in live to offer post-address rebuttals. CBS broke in but were late getting to the speech, going to The White House at about 4 minutes in, carried another 17 minutes and then broke back to the studio for analysis and rebuttals. 

Two moments from CBS’s coverage: First, as our colleague Nick Fondacaro points out, Major Garrett and Tony Dokoupil insist on claiming there is no evidence to support President Trump’s claims despite not having seen a single one of the declassified documents. Then Garett suggests Trump is going to steal the midterms (click “expand” to view all transcripts).

 

 

TONY DOKOUPIL: He did not completely walk the line of the promise from The White House to not relitigate 2020.

MAJOR GARRETT: He came close to it. He didn’t use some of the rhetoric he has used in the past, but he inferred that there was still something problematic about the election when there was not.

DOKOUPIL: And the claim that there are noncitizens and dead people active on voter rolls.

GARRETT: Actively voting- that is not substantiated. But he said there are catastrophic vulnerabilities and Tony, you have to ask yourself what is that rhetoric about? Is that rhetoric about setting the stage for federal intervention in the midterms? I mean, we’ve had primary elections all this year. We’ve had more in August. Those primary elections have been under a system that the President said that is catastrophically vulnerable. Yet he and all the other Republicans and Democrats have accepted the elections, I mean, the results of those primaries because they’re being carried out according to state law and with resilient and checkable and auditable results.

Amazing stuff here. Is the refusal to acknowledge the possibility of a scintilla of election-related impropriety not its own form of election denialism?

Next, Face the Nation host Margaret Brennan comes on and refutes President Trump’s claims against China with…literal Chinese propaganda.

 

 

MARGARET BRENNAN: It’s impossible for us to fact-check each thing that was said but on the specific thing in regard to China that you raised, the President was informed when he was President in his first term, in a classified memo on January 7th. Both the assessments regarding interference, and that was also public prior to that date. So he was aware. And we reported on this network at the time in regard to the assessments as to which foreign countries favored which election candidates. He seems to be alleging that China actively tried to undermine him and even referenced wanting to get him to resign at one point. Ahead of this I did reach out to Chinese officials who were already prepared with a prerebuttal here. I’ll read it to you.

The quote is: “China has long adhered to the principle of noninterference in others’ internal affairs. The U.S. election is an internal matter, its outcome determined by the American people. China never and will never interfere in the Presidential elections of the United States.”

Now, what was assessed by the intelligence community and made public as recently as- I’m looking at April 2020, I want to read for you what was in the National Intelligence Council. It’s “Chinese intelligence officials analyzed multiple states’ election voter registration data, to conduct public opinion and analysis on the 2020 U.S. general election.” So public opinion analysis is what the U.S. intelligence community said the Chinese were doing. The President is alleging something far more aggressive there in actively undermining his presidency and I think, Tony, the question for tomorrow will continue to be, “and so what are you going to do about it?”

Like the Chinese Embassy is going to admit to any sort of wrongdoing. Brennan didn’t address the specific claims made by President Trump against China such as the voter data breach, alleged printing of ballots, or corporate influence operation. Instead, she just regurgitates the statement from the Embassy. 

NBC refused to air the speech, breaking in after the fact and offering minimal coverage. This segment offers the fullest compendium thereof:

 

 

HALLIE JACKSON: Let me bring in now our Chief White House Correspondent Garrett Haake, who is joining us from the North Lawn. And Garrett, President Trump previously for years had pushed conspiracy theories about election fraud. So bring us up to speed tonight. What did he say, if anything, that was new?

GARRETT HAAKE: Hallie, broadly speaking, much of this would sound familiar to people who follow the President. He described the U.S. election system as falling, in his words, “catastrophically short of the standards we should have for election security” and described the declassification and review of American election records that broadly fell into several categories, including that obtaining of voter information by China. Another category as relates to activities that were taking place in Venezuela. A third category on cover-ups, and a fourth on domestic, let's call them voter irregularities, including a focus specifically on one GOTV group in Michigan.

He concluded with a line -- I don't know if it was scripted or ad lib -- saying that stolen elections can not happen again. But never did he use the data he was presenting to make a case that any specific election was stolen. Merely that there were these categories of vulnerabilities. He concluded with a push to pass the SAVE America Act, a piece of legislation that would overhaul parts of the voting system in this country, namely requiring voter ID and proof of citizenship to both register and to vote, casting that as a prescription. But again, the prescription didn't exactly match up with the complaints that the President outlined throughout the course of this. As you said, Hallie, hundreds of pages of documents here released by The White House with information we still have to review to find what exactly is new and what’s supported by other information publicly available.

JACKSON: And our team’s looking through it, Garrett, thanks, including our National Security and Global Affairs Correspondent Dan De Luce. And Dan, one of the questions people will ask: was there anything revealed by the President, is there anything in these documents that would have changed any actual vote count?

DAN DE LUCE: I didn't hear that in that speech. He talked about China not wanting him to get elected. He talked about them getting ahold of this voter data. But I didn't hear him, and I haven't seen in these documents so far some kind of indication that China or another foreign actor penetrated our voting system, got into a state’s election counting system, tampered with ballots. He didn't talk about that. I don't see it yet in the documents. He's not even really alleging that. So, I think the case is still out there. As far as we know, and there's such overwhelming evidence, Joe Biden won that election. And he's also not making clear what should be done now, exactly. Because he's talked about the federal government should take over the process. But he kind of left that open in that speech.

In sum, a fancy version of “without evidence” and complaints of Trump not presenting evidence during the speech that had just been declassified. There was also the allegation that there was no evidence of China interfering on our voting system and ballots. But what is a 220 million voter data breach, ballot printing operation and corporate influence operation if not interference with our election?

Finally, there’s ABC: they came in after the speech and unloaded. Here’s how Mary Bruce opened the special coverage:

 

 

MARY BRUCE: Good evening, I’m Mary Bruce. We are coming back on the air because President Trump has just completed his address to the nation, touting his record and what he believes are his accomplishments in office so far. For 22 minutes just now the President, in a rare prime-time address from The East Room, starting his remarks with the issues so many in our part- in his own party were hoping for him to tout. His efforts to bring down healthcare costs. Immigration and the border. And the economy. Also touching briefly on the ongoing war with Iran. And then the President, for the bulk of these remarks, focusing squarely on the nation’s elections. Saying that without trust in the nation’s elections there can be no greatness. And announcing the declassification and release of what he called critical intelligence that reveals vulnerabilities in our infrastructure, claiming it shows foreign interference, especially by China, and renewing his previous claims of irregularities in voting machines.

The President just made a host of allegations about information that he claims has been withheld from the public and withheld from him when he was President, and he's calling for the Justice Department and the FBI and CIA to investigate how this information, in his words, was hidden. The President, of course, was President at the time, but still he is attacking the intelligence agencies that reported to him in 2020. The President is now making these new claims based on existing intelligence that he's now declassifying, after directing his administration to go back and review the raw data. He is now making this information public for all to see on The White House website, whitehouse.gov. We should stress this is complicated. This is information that is just being made public. And our teams, just like the public, are carefully unpacking all of this. We're going to continue to do so tonight and throughout the coming days. The President saying his purpose in disclosing this information, quote, “is not to weaken confidence in elections, but to earn that confidence by confronting vulnerabilities and correcting them.” The President, we should note, has for years pushed false claims of fraud. This is a deeply personal issue for President Trump, something he's been talking about a lot since he lost the 2020 election. Claims of widespread voter fraud, though, have been repeatedly disproven by the Courts and by members of his own party in his first administration.

If this is so complicated, as Mary Bruce alleges, why not just air the speech so viewers can follow along? If you ever wondered why we refer to the media as “Elitist”, there you have it: a Chief White House Correspondent signaling to viewers that they’re too stupid to understand Trump’s various claims. Also, just for fun: contrast how Bruce refers to Trump’s accomplishments (“what he believes are his accomplishments”) versus her drooling recount of Joe Biden’s farewell to the nation.

The elitism theme continues. Here’s Rachel Scott also saying that Trump’s statements are “complex:”

 

 

MARY BRUCE: I want to go now to Rachel Scott at The White House. And Rachel, so much has been discussed today about why the President is giving this speech now.

RACHEL SCOTT: Yes, Mary, you look- sources tell me that this is an issue that the President, quite frankly, has been fixated on, that the President wanted to come before the American people tonight and deliver this address. There's a lot of discussion over on Capitol Hill about whether or not this should have been the focus of what the President should be talking about. We are so close to the midterm elections. They’re just about 110 days away. And for a lot of Republicans, they wanted to hear what the President outlined in probably the first 60 seconds of this speech, talking about the economy, talking about immigration issues they believe are going to be front and center for voters in this midterm election.

And there was a question heading into tonight, because The White House was very tight-lipped on what exactly the President was going to say- about how much President Trump would be focused on the 2020 election. We know he has made a series and slew of false claims about that election that he lost, but the President did spend quite a significant time talking about the 2020 election. Again, what the President presented tonight, it's complex. Our team is digging through these documents that The White House says they're now declassifying and making available to the American people. We're reading through it to fact check and understand more of what the President is presenting. But I can tell you, here is what we do know. We know that President Trump and his allies, they challenged the 2020 election repeatedly. They lost about 60 cases in court. We know that the President tonight was talking about how he was deceived. He talked about how the American people were deceived in the 2020 election. Of course, President Trump was President at the time, and his own intelligence officials were presenting assessments to him that showed there was no widespread evidence that would have changed the outcome of the election, something that his own Attorney General said at the time, too, Mary.

BRUCE: And that is such an important point and as you know, we are all combing through this.

Rachel Scott’s post-speech prebuttal is indistinguishable from what you’d hear from a Democrat elected official. And it’s worth noting Scott addresses none of the substance of Trump’s remarks. Instead she concern trolls Republicans about the subject of the speech before saying the allegations are "complex." Again, why not air the speech?

Then there's Pierre Thomas, tackling the noncitizen voters and allegations of "Deep State" meddling. Credit to Thomas, though, for acknowledging the Chinese voter data theft:

 

 

MARY BRUCE: And Pierre, in Washington, you know, the President spent so much of these remarks tonight making these claims, especially about China. And I know that that is something that we have looked at before in the past, accusations that China was involved or somehow trying to meddle in the 2020 election. And I do want to read what the President said about calling for new investigations, because he said that he is asking the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, the Justice Department, the FBI and the CIA to investigate how and why such crucial information was hidden and to fire those involved. And you, I understand, are learning that the DHS is going to be discussing this more tomorrow.

PIERRE THOMAS: Indeed. Mary, here are some of the dominant points. As you point out, he is claiming that China was able to get access to voter registration information about millions of Americans, hundreds of millions of millions of Americans. What we don't yet know is whether they were able to do anything with that information. There is no evidence that they were, again, able to change the outcome of votes. The other very specific thing that he pointed out that I did take note of is that he said that DHS had found that 278,000 noncitizens are registered to vote, and that DHS will be doing a briefing on that fact tomorrow. Again, that's a very specific thing that can be checked out. We will look at and the secretaries of state who conduct these elections, I'm sure, will have something to say about whether this information is accurate or not. So again, a lot to unpack.

And the final point I would make, Mary, is this: part of his claim is that his administration, the top intelligence and top law enforcement officials misled and kept information from him, calling them the Deep State. That is a very damning accusation. It will be interesting to see what some of those people who were in position have to say about that.

BRUCE: Yeah, Pierre, as we were saying, the President now really shining a spotlight in many ways on his own first administration and asking a lot of questions about who knew what and when. A lot of questions to be asked and unpacked in the coming days.

On the one hand, it’s nice to see Pierre Thomas deviate from the subject matter being “complex.” On the other, Thomas plays the “no evidence” card and moves the goalposts as to the extent of the Chinese intrusion. Thomas denies votes were changed but doesn’t address the substance of Trump’s allegations. Thomas closes out by questioning the number of noncitizens registered to vote, and Trump’s statements on the Deep State. 

Much of this coverage could have been avoided had the Elitist media simply aired the totality of President Trump’s remarks live, so that Americans could come to their own conclusions. But that’s a bridge too far. Instead, they largely chose to self-censor at the behest of a socialist Member of Congress. Americans’ trust in media numbers aren’t going up anytime soon, if this pathetic performance is any indication.

Donor Privacy Policy