Donald Trump after his speech in the White House. Image: keystone
analysis
There is a perfidious strategy behind the US President’s lies.
July 17, 2026, 2:12 p.mJuly 17, 2026, 2:12 p.m
As soon as Donald Trump’s speech was announced, it was clear to everyone what the US President wanted to say. Grandly proclaimed as a revelation of election manipulation, it turned out to be a hodgepodge of well-known complaints about an allegedly manipulated 2020 election, unproven claims and outright lies.
The roughly 30-minute speech culminated in a warning about the threat of manipulation in the midterm elections and a call on Congress to pass a law that would restrict the voting rights of mainly poorer Americans.
Donald Trump as he lives and lies.Image: keystone
Why is the man doing this to himself? The question arises, after all, Trump no longer has to fear an election and could enjoy his second term in office in a relaxed manner. The answer can be found on two levels, one psychological and one political.
You don’t have to be Sigmund Freud to realize that the pathological narcissist Trump can’t lose. He will never admit that he was beaten by Joe Biden of all people. It has become almost an obsession. “It feels like Captain Ahab in Moby Dick,” says Trevor Potter, a former chairman of the Republican caucus, in the New York Times. “He is fixated on his claim that he did not lose the 2020 elections. Kitchen psychologists may explain that he doesn’t like it when he loses. But it has obviously become a pillar of his psyche and, to a certain extent, an important part of his government.”
“Moby Dick,” by the way, is a classic novel by Herman Melville in which a captain of a whaling ship is fixated on killing a white whale.
However, it is more than Trump’s psyche that must be used to explain the speech. Trump knows what other demagogues before him have already recognized, for example Adolf Hitler’s mouthpiece, Joseph Goebbels. The recipe is simple: If you repeat a lie enough times, over time it will be believed.
George Orwell also wrote in his novel “1984” that whoever has the power to rewrite the past can also decide the future for themselves.
Trump’s lies have long legs
Trump is doing exactly this, persistently and shamelessly. Like a prayer wheel, he repeats that the 2020 elections were rigged and that he actually won by a large margin. “The specific allegations – voting machines, ballot harvesting, dead voters – may all have long been disproven, but that doesn’t matter,” Jeffrey Sonnenfeld notes in his book “Trump’s Ten Commandments.” “The general impression that something illegal took place remains in the public consciousness.”
Unfortunately that’s true. The Economist-YouGov vote barometer shows that around half of Republicans are now convinced that the 2020 election was actually rigged, although more than 60 judges – many of them even appointed by Trump – have rejected this claim as baseless.
In a politically heated climate, lies and conspiracy theories have long legs. The fact that Charlie Kirk was murdered by Israel is already a classic. Recently, Lindsey Graham’s death is also said to have no natural causes.
With his sometimes absurd and easily refuted lies, Trump wants to prepare the ground for the midterm elections. The general expectation is that this will be a debacle for the Republicans. Trump’s popularity ratings have now fallen to 37 percent, according to the latest Washington Post survey.
The USA is not Nazi Germany
The reasons for the low polls are obvious: God may know how the USA can get out of the Iran war without massive loss of face, but Trump certainly doesn’t. The affordability crisis has not been resolved, and now there are increasing signs of a crash in tech stocks.
At the same time, the President will pull out all the stops to prevent a Democratic majority – in the worst case in both chambers of Congress. But the Democrats also know this, and they are pulling out all the stops to prevent Trump from doing just that.
You have a good chance of being successful with it. Trump may be taking his cue from Goebbels and the USA may be on a dangerous path to becoming an authoritarian state, but it is still a long way from becoming Nazi Germany. Two of the major TV stations – NBC and ABC – refused to broadcast Trump’s speech. The leading newspapers like the New York Times and the Washington Post treated her neglectfully, and if they reported at all, they panned the speech based on grades.
In addition, Trump’s election manipulation claims are now more worn out than the gay anthem “YMCA,” which blares from all the loudspeakers at presidential rallies. Except for the hard MAGA core, they no longer fall on fertile ground. Young men, blacks and Hispanics, who helped Trump win the election, are now turning away from him in droves.
Conversely, these claims are Viagra for Democratic voters. They will rush to the polls in large numbers on November 3rd. Trump could therefore experience what already happened to Viktor Orban. The majority against him is so overwhelming that all attempts at manipulation are doomed to failure.