‘People Aren’t Stupid’

By Nick Catoggio

Friday, July 17, 2026

 

Democracy is the least bad form of government, which is to say that its flaws are less oppressive than any other’s.

 

In an autocracy, public officials aren’t allowed to call the ruler stupid even when it’s true. Far better is democracy, where public officials need only avoid calling the public itself stupid.

 

Even when it’s true.

 

Modern America is a hybrid of the two. The Republican Party is an autocracy, and its members behave accordingly whenever the subject of the ruler’s idiocy is broached. Whereas the Democratic Party remains free to notice and comment on his idiocy—although not, of course, the idiocy of the people themselves.

 

“People aren’t stupid,” Democratic Sen. Elissa Slotkin dutifully declared after the president delivered a televised speech last night about foreign influence in the 2020 presidential campaign. Her point was that voters won’t forget about an endless, aimless war in Iran and the spike it’s caused in gas prices just because Donald Trump is dangling a shiny object in front of them. And I suppose that’s true.

 

But “people aren’t stupid” is a hell of a claim to make about America in 2026.

 

For instance: A few days ago the House overwhelmingly passed a bill that would make daylight saving time permanent. That’s objectively stupid for all the reasons Josh Barro lists here. It was tried before with disastrous results; it ignores obvious trade-offs, like pushing sunrise to 8:30 a.m. in the winter; and it’s a gross overreaction to the burden of having to adjust clocks twice a year, something that most digital technology does automatically.

 

Stupid. But popular!

 

Another example: On Wednesday, while preparing for an air show in Florida, a Blue Angels pilot buzzed the crowd on a beach in Pensacola by descending to an altitude of a few dozen feet while banking at a nearly 90-degree angle. That triggered a safety review, as the altitude was “lower than standard profiles”; any error, like a bird strike to the engine, could have caused mass death. And if it had, it wouldn’t be the first time that a military daredevil had needlessly killed a bunch of people while showing off on what should have been a routine flight.

 

But if you know how Pete Hegseth’s Pentagon operates, you can guess what happened next. “No reprimands. No firings. No problem. That’s the sound of Freedom!”, acting Navy Secretary Hung Cao tweeted alongside a video of the incident. Hegseth himself snarked that “the flyovers will continue until morale improves,” to which one person replied—not implausibly—“someday this tweet is going to be evidence in court.”

 

The people who lead our “High-T Department of War” are maliciously reckless morons, so bent on creating a culture of impunity that they’re willing to excuse aggressive idiocy purely because it’s aggressive. This episode isn’t the only reminder they’ve had lately that bad things happen when you decide that caution and prudence are for wimps, but the essence of stupidity is failing to learn lessons despite being taught over and over. That’s our military leadership.

 

And that’s our electorate, which failed to learn an obvious lesson the first time around about what sort of bad things might happen when you trust Donald Trump with power.

 

I’m less confident than Elissa Slotkin is that “people aren’t stupid” enough to fall for the president’s latest scheme to manufacture a pretext to interfere in November’s election. But I also don’t think trying to fool the rubes was the reason he spoke on Thursday evening.

 

An IQ gut check.

 

The crux of his speech was that the U.S. had raw intelligence in 2020 that China hoped to interfere in that year’s presidential election. The Chinese obtained American voter rolls, Trump claimed, and supposedly intended to “manufacture illegal ballots for Joe Biden” to that end. On top of that, more than a quarter-million illegal immigrants are supposedly registered to vote right now in swing states. And America’s cybersecurity around voting machines is alarmingly weak, he noted.

 

The only possible conclusion, the president went on to say, is that, “These disclosures reveal an election system so broken and vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it.”

 

Let’s start with China. If they have America’s voter rolls, it’s no great feat of espionage: The rolls are publicly available to anyone who wants them. And the “ballots for Biden” idea appears to be a deliberate or, well, stupid misreading of the intelligence, which apparently came from a single source who got the information second-hand and was viewed skeptically by some intelligence officials. The actual claim was that the Chinese were planning to manufacture fake driver’s licenses that could be used to cast tens of thousands of mail-in ballots.

 

But they didn’t. There’s no evidence that fake ballots were created or cast. Even Trump didn’t say so, ultimately going no further than to accuse the Chinese of having conducted an influence operation—the sort of thing that happens all the time, as J.D. Vance admitted two days ago—aimed at “undermining domestic confidence in the U.S. president.”

 

So here’s our first gut-check on public stupidity. If what China did is so outrageous, the public should now expect the president to take harsh official action against it, no? Diplomatic penalties, sanctions, maybe even war: Everything’s on the table when you meddle with the American people’s sovereignty.

 

If Trump doesn’t act—if he continues to sound like a 13-year-old girl talking about Taylor Swift when he talks about Xi Jinping—Americans should draw a pretty firm conclusion from that about how seriously to take his accusations, one would think.

 

Illegal immigrants voting en masse is another longtime hobby horse of the president’s, dating back to when he lost the popular vote to Hillary Clinton in 2016 and needed a way to explain it aside from the obvious. No one knows where he got last night’s figure of 278,000 illegals supposedly being registered in battlegrounds, though; officials from one of the states he named, Nevada, claimed after the speech that just 138 voters out of 2.1 million failed to provide either a driver’s license or Social Security number when they registered.

 

Another IQ gut-check, then: If voting by illegal immigrants is a widespread problem in America, the Todd Blanche/Kash Patel Justice Department should be spitting out indictments around the clock. The department has charged people for that crime, and you’d better believe they’re looking for more, yet the numbers remain small. What should Americans deduce from the fact that so few prosecutions have resulted?

 

As for cybersecurity around elections, Trump is doubtless right that there are holes that need plugging. Gut-check No. 3e: How sincere are his concerns considering that he hollowed out the Cybersecurity and Infrastructure Security Agency, purged the Election Assistance Commission, and had the DOJ back way off of its usual measures to protect an upcoming federal election?

 

We’re not done. If there was evidence of Chinese shenanigans before the election in 2020, why is John Ratcliffe still head of the CIA this evening? Ratcliffe was the director of national intelligence at the time; it was his job to make sure that the dreaded “deep state” wasn’t concealing information from then-President Trump. Evidently he failed in that duty, per Trump learning only years later that China had been up to no good. When is Ratcliffe being fired?

 

If the dastardly duo of Chinese spies and illegal-immigrant voters was clever enough to thwart Trump’s reelection in 2020, when he and his team were in charge of the government, why weren’t they clever enough to thwart it when the Biden administration was in charge in 2024? It’s very strange, as GOP Rep. Thomas Massie observed, that Republicans continue to win election after election in a system that’s supposedly rotten with fraud and foreign plots contrived to block them from power.

 

After five years of paranoia and propaganda, the president has so little credibility on this subject that even friendly news outlets had to tread lightly when reporting on the speech. Fox News made a point of noting on the air that it couldn’t vouch for the accuracy of Trump’s claims, and it had 787.5 million reasons to do so. Bari Weiss’ CBS News opened its coverage by flatly acknowledging that “much of what the president had said on this topic [in the past] has been false.” Other networks declined to carry the speech altogether, naturally drawing fascist threats about revoking their broadcast licenses as punishment.

 

In the same way that no one took Trump seriously when he suddenly announced that America would be charging a 20 percent toll on tankers in the Strait of Hormuz, no one with more than a room-temperature IQ takes him seriously when he starts babbling about election fraud. He’s so prone to insane lies about election conspiracies that for news networks merely to transmit his words on the topic, live and unedited, is to invite a grave risk of defamation suits.

 

Yet the fact remains that Americans were stupid enough to reelect him. Why wouldn’t they, or at least a meaningful number of them, also be stupid enough to swallow this latest sore-loser nonsense?

 

Many will. But getting people to believe that a new election conspiracy is afoot wasn’t really the purpose of his speech, I think.

 

Influence and interference.

 

Last night’s remarks were the electoral equivalent of the address Trump made on February 28, after bombs had begun falling on Iran. The president had done next to nothing before the war to prepare Americans for the conflict and nothing at all to gain Congress’ approval in advance, and so the point of that speech wasn’t “here’s what we need to do and I’d like your support.” If it had been, he would have delivered it before the war began.

 

The point was “here’s what I’m doing, just FYI.” It was a bare-minimum check-the-box simulacrum of democratic accountability about a course of action he intended to pursue whether Americans liked it or not.

 

That was also the point yesterday. As our own Steve Hayes put it, “The important thing isn’t the speech, it’s what the speech is meant to set up.” The president intends to do something to tamper with the midterm election, just FYI, and last night was his check-the-box gesture of faux-accountability to justify it preemptively.

 

And he’s going to do it whether Americans like it or not.

 

That may explain the most curious thing about his remarks, the fact that he didn’t resort to his usual wild 2020 claims about voting machines being hacked or ballot-harvesting “mules” delivering fake votes for Biden en masse. Trump was uncharacteristically circumspect, implying that the outcome of the election was suspect due to Chinese scheming and illegal-immigrant chicanery but never asserting it. Even some of his favorite “rigged election” instigators toned things down for the event. How come?

 

I doubt that he did it at the behest of members of his party. They were reportedly “scared sh-tless” before the speech that he would veer off-script and ad-lib his way into a televised fever dream they’d spend the next four months having to defend (as autocracy requires!), but Trump isn’t one to ease off the paranoia just because doing so would help candidates from his party. Ask Republicans in Georgia about that.

 

I doubt, too, that his goal was to pressure Senate Republicans into finally passing the SAVE America Act, his obsession for most of this year. He ended the speech by calling on them to do so, but passing that bill would require eliminating the filibuster, and Majority Leader John Thune and others have explained to him many times that the votes aren’t there. Even if it did pass, it couldn’t be implemented before November. And the legislation wouldn’t address some of Trump’s core complaints in the speech, like China conducting an influence campaign to damage his image.

 

He didn’t give the speech because he’s trying to get the SAVE America Act passed. He gave it because he needs to rationalize what he intends to do after the SAVE America Act doesn’t pass.

 

The president himself might not know yet what the plan is. Maybe he’ll try to extort state election officials into doing his bidding by threatening to charge them criminally if they don’t. Maybe he’ll dispatch the National Guard and ICE to polling places in nonwhite districts to try to intimidate voters. Maybe he’ll send agents to seize ballot boxes in swing counties where the GOP ends up having a rough night. Or maybe he’ll issue an order claiming the authority to compel states to implement parts of the SAVE America Act—namely, voter ID and a ban on mail-in ballots—as a matter of executive power.

 

That’s not hypothetical. According to the Washington Post, a 17-page draft order to that effect has already been prepared by “activists” who are in touch with the White House. The draft reportedly “claims China interfered in the 2020 election as a basis to declare a national emergency that would unlock extraordinary presidential power over voting.” The Post published that scoop in February; now, five months later, here we are.

 

That’s why the president surprisingly stuck to the available “facts” last night instead of indulging in his usual wild theories, I suspect: He’s planning to take legal action on the election and saw the speech as a way to establish an evidentiary predicate for it. Whatever orders he ends up issuing will be challenged in court, and when they are, it will help his case that those orders aren’t based on something obviously insane about Venezuelan communists changing votes in Pennsylvania or whatever.

 

Sam Stein drew the correct, and ironic, lesson in a piece for The Bulwark this morning. The speech was Trump’s own version of a foreign influence campaign aimed at undermining public trust in U.S. elections. Postliberals abroad have connived for ages to try to weaken Americans’ faith in their nation, but it took a homegrown version with a keener sense of how stupid the people are to succeed at it. “No regime, no spies, no saboteurs have yet matched the damage that America’s own president did tonight,” The Atlantic’s Tom Nichols observed after Trump’s remarks.

 

The key point, though, is that it’s an influence campaign only for the moment. The president won’t content himself with trying to shape public opinion about the coming midterm election and then resolve to take his lumps on election night. This will end up as an interference campaign, in which a malign actor tampers directly with the outcome. And it was destined to become one from the moment the certainly-not-stupid American electorate reelected him in 2024.

 

The Trump era will be remembered as a period of supreme, grotesque, relentless demoralization, in which the person trusted with leading the United States did everything he feasibly could to destroy respect for the country even among its own citizens. Calling any American institution “so broken and vulnerable that no one can possibly defend it” is Trumpism at 100 percent purity. When someone tells you that his speech was a calculated “distraction” designed to steer public attention away from Iran or gas prices, they’re telling you that they still haven’t grasped that yet. The demoralization is the point. There’s nothing postliberals desire more.