Here's the Secret Democratic Presidential Candidate Nobody Is Talking About

Trump's election speech fell apart before the coverage ended. CNN wouldn't carry it. Jon Ossoff called it in advance — and looked more presidential doing it than anyone else in the party.

Hey, Raw America family. Welcome to the Sunday Wrapup. I’m here with my cup of coffee, mulling over what happened Thursday night.

Before we get into it — thank you for being a paying subscriber this week. You keep the lights on here. There’s no billionaire behind Raw America, no hedge fund, no ad department nervously watching the White House. There’s you. I sincerely appreciate it.

Kaitlan Collins Did The Job

Thursday night, the president gave a 24-minute primetime address on “election integrity.” CNN didn’t take it live. Kaitlan Collins anchored her own hour and told viewers why: Trump’s well-documented history of falsehoods. John King put it plainly: we have to be skeptical when this president talks about elections.

ABC and NBC didn’t carry it on their main channels either. ABC ran a game show; NBC ran a show about alligators. CBS joined a few minutes late, leaving before he finished. MS NOW aired seventeen minutes and cut away. Fox carried the whole thing.

NBC and ABC affiliates owned by Sinclair ran it live anyway, against their own networks’ judgment. Sinclair’s conservative ownership likely explains why.

While Fox ran the speech live, it received scant attention the following day on Fox & Friends. Fox paid $787.5 million to settle with the voting firm Dominion over 2020 election lies. Some of what looked like editorial spine was also lawyers doing math.

Trump’s response was to attack ABC and NBC from the podium, and say that “fraud like this should mean a revocation of their licenses.” Bernie Sanders called it what it is: authoritarian.

The Actual Election Interference Is On Tape

While Trump rages about election interference, let’s remember who actually committed it.

On Jan. 2, 2021, Trump called Georgia Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger and said he wanted to find 11,780 votes — one more than he needed. Raffensperger, a Republican, refused. The call was recorded: you can listen to it right now.

That’s a sitting president pressuring a state official to manufacture a result. Not an allegation.

There were rumblings before Thursday that Trump would use the speech to declare Georgia’s Democratic senators illegitimately elected. We’re glad that didn’t happen.

He Released Evidence Of Russian Interference

This is the part that would be funny if it weren’t so grim.

Trump declassified intelligence files to prove China interfered in 2020. Experts read them. The documents don’t support the China claim. What one assessment does describe is Putin and senior Russian officials overseeing proxy efforts to spread damaging claims about Joe Biden.

The paperwork meant to prove Trump’s case describes Russian interference on his behalf.

Then came the admissions.

John Solomon, the conservative journalist who worked with the White House on releasing these documents, told MS NOW shortly after the speech that the intelligence community has zero evidence a foreign power flipped a vote in 2020, 2022, or 2024.

Ben Ginsberg, a Republican election attorney, told CNN there’s still no evidence of any effect on an election result.

The people who built the case took it apart within the hour.

Jon Ossoff Quietly Emerging As Presidential Candidate

I want to talk a little about Georgia senator Jon Ossoff, who I think is emerging as a strong presidential candidate.

Here’s why. For the last two weeks he’s been doing what Democrats talk about constantly and almost never do: going straight at Trump, in public, without checking a poll first.

Ossoff calls Trump “a failed president and a national disgrace,” leading a “Mar-a-Lago mafia.”

“When he’s not posting, he’s been trying to rob us,” he adds. The IRS lawsuit. The fund that could pay January 6 rioters. The foreign deals by “Prince Don and Prince Eric.” An Iran war “no one voted for and no one can explain.” All while you pay more for gas, groceries and healthcare.

Then came the hearing for Jay Clayton, Trump’s nominee for Intelligence Director. Ossoff stopped looking like a senator and started looking like something bigger.

He asked Clayton one question: who won the 2020 election? Clayton dodged. He asked again. And again. Finally: “Isn’t it humiliating to be unable to answer this question, to have to indulge the president’s delusions?”

That’s not a rally line to a friendly crowd. That’s a man running an interrogation and winning it on camera.

He also got out ahead of Trump’s speech Thursday night, which nobody else did. Hours before Trump reached the podium, Ossoff named the real election criminal in Georgia — Trump, when he “dialed up our state’s senior most election official” and “tried to bully him in a recorded phone call to find the exact number of votes Donald Trump needed to win in a state that he had lost.” He’d already predicted the speech would be “equal parts pathetic and dangerous.”

One viral hearing isn’t a national campaign. But for two weeks, people got a look at what a Democrat who fights and wins actually sounds like.

Why It All Matters

Thursday night worked as a test. CNN’s Kaitlan Collins passed. But look at what passing required: an anchor willing to tell viewers the president lies, at a network being circled by new ownership, on a night the president threatened broadcast licenses from the podium.

That instinct exists because of who signs the checks. It survives only as long as those people allow it. Bezos owns the Washington Post. The LA Times went MAGA. But Raw America is here, courageous, calling it like it is.

I started Raw Story in 2004 out of college. We ended up naming a CIA black site the Washington Post wouldn’t touch. The ethos then was simple and it hasn’t changed. We’re not interested in deference to power.

Raw America fights for you. We’ve got a spine of steel, because of our subscribers. Thanks for being part of our community.

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See you next Sunday.

—John Byrne / Founder, Raw America and Raw Story