At 9:01 p.m., Donald J. Trump stood in the East Room of the White House and delivered one of the most dangerous speeches ever given by an American president. It was not because of a foreign attack or because the country faced some new national emergency. It was because Donald Trump is still obsessed with the election he lost in 2020, and he is already laying the groundwork to rig the next one, less than four months from now. For 25 minutes, he gripped the presidential seal and used the full authority of the presidency to tell Americans that their elections cannot be trusted, that the intelligence community has been lying to them for years, that China secretly compromised the system, that the media is part of the conspiracy, and that anyone who opposes his election bill "wants to cheat." This was not a speech about election security. It was a speech about convincing millions of Americans that they should distrust the results of the next election so that he can cling to power when Republicans lose.