Has Donald Trump or his campaign explained what his plan is so that "we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not gonna have to vote"?

Question

In a speech on July 26^th, 2024 at the Believers’ Summit, that was televised live by the Right Side Broadcasting Network, the current Presidential Candidate for the Republican Party Donald J. Trump gave the following remarks:

And again, Christians get out and vote! Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore! Four more years, you know what? It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians, I love you Christians, I’m a Christian! I love you! Get out! You gotta get out and vote. In four years you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not gonna have to vote.

Here is a video of the speech on the official YouTube channel of the RSBN (it is also available on RSBN's own website). The RSBN is listed on the event's website as the official broadcasting partner. Therefore, I have no reason to suspect this video to be altered. Furthermore, the speech is also available on C-SPAN with identical content.

Is there any further information available in Donald Trump’s platform, from his campaign, or himself about how he plans to achieve this goal of "Christians no longer needing to vote"? Has Donald J. Trump expanded on this point in other speeches, in interviews, or in his writing?

I am not interested in opinions, speculations, interpretations, or mind-reading. I am looking for factual sources that explain how he intends to make good on this promise.

I have seen speculation that this is related to his promise of implementing stronger voter ID verification and returning to paper ballots instead of electronic voting machines. But again, this is just speculation and not fact.

Answer 1

Before and after this quote, Donald Trump laid out a number of perceived problems and said that they will be fixed if he/Republicans get elected this year. Based on that, he's likely saying that people need to vote this year, and after 4 years he will fix all those problems so they won't need to vote next time.

Some excerpts of the speech from the Youtube video of it, starting about 3 minutes before the part quoted in the question:

...we will take over the horribly run capital of our nation in Washington DC, clean it up, renovate it, make it beautiful, rebuild our capital city so that it is no longer a nightmare of murder and crime but rather it will become the most beautiful Capital anywhere in the world.

...

Day one I will sign a new executive order to cut Federal funding for any school pushing critical race theory, transgender insanity, and other inappropriate racial sexual or political content onto the lives of our children. Thank you,it's true save our kids is right, save our kids is right, and I- you're right, thank you, and I will not give one penny to any school that has a vaccine mandate or a mask mandate not a penny.

...

I will secure our elections, our goal will be as I said one day voting with paper ballots, proof of citizenship, and a thing called voter ID. You know when you negotiate, and I do that with a Democrat, and I negotiate with them all the time on this, but I say look we got to fix our laws on voting, we have to start with voter ID, everybody has to said no way it- just the discussion never even goes any further, I say we have to have voter ID it's called voter identification.

And leading up to the quote in the question he says that they need a landslide victory since that will somehow make it unable to be 'rigged', and after such a victory the (Christian) audience he was speaking to won't have to vote again:

...Republicans must win, we have to win this election, most important election ever, we want a landslide that's too big to rig, if you want to save America get your friends, get your family, get everyone you know and vote vote early, vote absentee, vote on Election Day, I don't care how but you have to get out and vote, and again Christians get out and vote, just this time you won't have to do it anymore.

Immediately after that, he continues broadly explaining that all current problems will be fixed during the next term as long as he/Republicans win this year:

...every disaster Joe Biden and Kamala Harris have created can be fixed and can be fixed quickly, and it will be fixed quickly, every problem can be solved and every wrong can be rectified by this time next year America's borders will be strong, sealed, and secure, inflation will be in full retreat, we will have it in full retreat it will happen quickly...

Answer 2

Trump is intentionally ambiguous in all of his speeches. He likes being misinterpreted and reinterpreted, because it creates anxiety and conflict and feeds into conspiratorial thinking, both of which are critical to his campaign strategy.

The general upshot of this comment is that if Trump returns to power he will so alter the political and legal landscape that Christian nationalists won't have to worry about secular law or secular challenges to Christian hegemony. Christian doctrine will be so deeply entrenched in legal and political mechanisms that no one and nothing could change it. Trump is dangling the Christian nationalist wet-dream in front of the public without supplying the policy details of how it will be implemented, knowing that people rarely think about the pragmatics of implementing their wet-dreams.

Answer 3

TLDR: We are never going to know what he meant, not before the election at least.

If, as was being asked about, this was part of some official policy, then someone would have flagged its provenance already. Even if it was say in Project 2025's manifesto.

Doesn't mean the question was not worth asking, only that people on both sides will hear what they want to hear.

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Reuters

WASHINGTON, July 27 (Reuters) - Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told Christians on Friday that if they vote for him this November, "in four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote."

It was not clear what the former president meant by his remarks, in an election campaign where his Democratic opponents accuse him of being a threat to democracy, and after his attempt to overturn his 2020 defeat to President Joe Biden, an effort that led to the deadly insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

In an interview with Fox News in December, Trump said that if he won the Nov. 5 election he would be a dictator, but only on "day one", to close the southern border with Mexico and expand oil drilling.

Democrats have seized on that comment (note: the dictator for a day, not no voting needed anymore). Trump has since said the remarks were a joke.

Let's look at how different sides can interpret what he said about Christians and voting:

And again, Christians get out and vote! Just this time. You won’t have to do it anymore! Four more years, you know what?

• (charitable): he's just telling people to vote because it's important this time. And POTUS are every four years, so they just have to it once in four years and don't have to vote again. "Go out and vote (for me)" Standard political talk. You can even count me in that group.

• (uncharitable) Oh, he doesn't believe in democracy.

It’ll be fixed, it’ll be fine. You won’t have to vote anymore, my beautiful Christians, I love you Christians, I’m a Christian! I love you! Get out! You gotta get out and vote.

• (charitable) Well, obviously he's bonding with his supporters. And, yes, he's going to fix the fraud in the elections. Remember, whatever opinion you can have about Trump, he spends a lot of time in speeches explaining that he'll "fix things" by common sense and being decisive, cutting the Gordian knot. That's what he says here, standard stuff for him and, again, he is supremely good at bonding with his supporters, they'll give him a pass.

• (uncharitable) He wants to subvert democracy.

In four years you don’t have to vote again, we’ll have it fixed so good you’re not gonna have to vote.

• (charitable) Huh, not sure what he meant. Oh well, probably a joke or slip of the tongue. What he probably meant is that he will have fixed the electoral fraud issues.

• (uncharitable) He wants to be a dictator. Remember January 6th and the fake election claims. He only wants elections he can't lose.

Now maybe Trump misspoke and meant something else. Or maybe it was a slip of the tongue on never letting another "election steal, like 2020" happen, by making sure the people only choose Republican? Maybe it was a joke? He ad-libs a lot and his supporters love that about him. If really pushed his supporters will reason along the lines of: "... well sometimes he says weird things like bleach and viruses. Still, he's our guy."

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I'll add from an upvoted comment:

"He hopes to have so many policy goals achieved this time around that the audience will no longer feel a pressing need to care about the Presidency, at least for a while"

That - in the charitable camp - is certainly a possibility, but like other interpretations hard to prove.

In the skeptical camp, even if a 2nd Trump presidency "fixes" a lot of policy concerns Christians have, it's hard to see how that would be permanent - unless we were talking about a constitutional amendment - so it would stand to reason Reps would still have to defend those achievements in 2028. Executive orders - "day one actions" - would be especially open to reversal if the Dems win in 2028.

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Remember "dictator for a day"? Well, sure been talked about a lot but only Trump knows and he says it was a jest. Then he proceed to rip into "crooked Dems" and the awkward moment passes and he's back in form. He will do just that here. Republicans increasingly don't question him and will vote for him anyway. Democrats would not vote for him under any conditions so the only people that matter are the swing voters.

If undecided, consider - when looking at the two competing narratives above - what Trump's actions of the last 8 years have been before either dismissing it. Or taking it as revealing something of darker plans.

But you won't get the answer here. Again not that it was not worth asking because this is a political speech and could have been tied to a platform.

You won't get a straight answer from Trump either because if asked he'll deflect the question and immediately segue into how this is all a big ploy by the Dems to make him look bad.

p.s. as of today, on Fox News landing page for politics, the only title with vote in it is "Kamala Harris making gains with ‘double hater’ voters, Fox News poll shows" Nothing, as far as I can tell, covering this, out of 30 odd articles.

p.p.s. There is a lot of disinformation floating around. For example, numerous people have claimed that - rather than saying "I am a Christian", Trump said "I am not a Christian". Considering that his religious affiliation is easily checked, that's rather malicious. All the more if you think about the context - why the heck would he be going out of his way to say that to a Christian audience, even if that was somehow the case, which it isn't?

Answer 4

Trump is something of a political Rorschach test, and his speaking style is something of a "stream of consciousness". If you need a good reminder of that, watch his RNC acceptance speech, which clocked in at 92 minutes and rambled at length about various topics. Add in Trump's proclivity to over-promise (i.e. his promise to end the Ukraine war within 24 hours of taking office) and you tend to get statements like the one about Christians no longer needing to vote. If you dislike his 2020 post-election antics (and there's a lot there to dislike), he meant it literally. But, as even his detractors note, Trump loves engaging in hyperbole

Trump has a long history of making inflammatory proclamations that spark outrage from detractors and generate a stream of headlines, without ever coming to fruition. Often they are made in a tongue-in-cheek manner that allows Trump’s allies to claim he was joking and cite the backlash as another example of a candidate skilled at baiting an out-of-touch press that takes him far too literally.

Let's take this from the angle Trump was aiming for. Trump is explicitly talking to Christians at a Christian conference. He's also making his usual hyperbolic statements. The part the other answers are missing is why he feels the need to say this to a Christian audience.

In 2016, Trump won the nomination with 45% of the Republican primary vote. A 2016 LifeWay poll (LifeWay is Southern Baptist, a large Evangelical denomination) found a 45-31% breakdown between Trump and Clinton among Evangelical Christians going into the general election. And some hold that this voting block was critical to Trump's 2016 election. To help with this voting bloc, Trump made minimal inputs on the 2016 RNC platform

When Republican Party leaders drafted the platform prior to their convention in Cleveland last month, they had relatively little input from the campaign of then-presumptive nominee Donald Trump on most issues — except when it came to a future Republican administration's stance on Ukraine.

The RNC kept the same platform in 2020, largely due to the lack of a proper convention as a result of Covid-19. In 2024, however, Trump made major platform changes. The most notable was Trump's pivot on abortion

The policy document sticks to the party’s longstanding principle that the Constitution extends rights to fetuses, but removes language maintaining support for an “amendment to the Constitution and legislation to make clear that the Fourteenth Amendment’s protections apply to children before birth,” a passage in the party platform first included in 1984.

While abortion as a whole isn't a primary issue for most voters, it's still something Evangelicals largely oppose. This is part of his coalition Trump cannot afford to lose, especially given how narrow the polling overall as been. As Brad Raffensperger, the Georgia secretary of state, noted in an article he wrote on Trump's 2020 loss

In Georgia in 2020, there were 33,527 voters who requested a Republican ballot in Georgia’s primaries but who also did not participate — at all — in Georgia’s general election. Georgia had 14 Republican candidates for the U.S. House of Representatives on the ballot in the 2020 general election. Those 14 candidates’ combined vote total was 27,559 more than President Trump’s Georgia total. Another 27,967 voters voted for down-ballot Republicans but left the presidential contest blank. There were more than enough Republican votes in Georgia for President Trump to carry the state. Republicans just didn’t cast them.

It's fair to classify a good chunk of Georgia as Evangelical. It's also worth noting that Trump lost Georgia by 11,790 votes. In other words, it's hard not to conclude that Trump's narrow 2020 loss was caused, in part, by Evangelical Christians who decided to vote and undervoted for President. Trump's new position on abortion is not going to help that sentiment.

I don't expect Trump to clarify what he said (he rarely does), but the implication he appears to have been driving at is that electing him will give Evangelicals so many victories they won't need to worry about who is running for office in the future. He is not the first person to promise such things.

Answer 5

Having watched the speech, the context is this. Trump is speaking at "the believer's summit", a Christian conference. Trump says that Christians have a lot of voting power, but it's under-utilized because they don't turn out to vote.

Essentially, Trump is saying something like this "I know it's a lot of work to go out and vote, but just do it this one time. I will address your issues, and then you won't have to put in the effort to come out again."

See..
https://www.c-span.org/video/?537386-1/president-trump-speaks-turning-point-believers-summit

TIME CODES: 00:39:56 - 00:41:41, 1:02:40 - 1:03:28

Answer 6

If you just want the the 30-second answer, skip to the part in bold. (It may well become outdated though if Trump or his campaign put out something more substantive than that one-liner, which Reuters declared wasn't a "direct" clarification.)

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TBH, and to supplement Ted's answer which is getting some flak, IMHO this is not so different with the kind of controversy he stirred with his "dictator for a day" phrase, back in winter. As WaPo related and commented on that:

On Wednesday, UMass Amherst released the results of a poll conducted by YouGov in which respondents were asked about the concept. The framing of the comment was stark, excluding Trump’s specific plans for using his theoretical dictatorial power. It was just, “Trump recently said that if elected, he would be a dictator only on the first day of his second term. Do you think that this is a good or bad idea for the country?”

A plurality of respondents said this was “definitely bad” with 6 in 10 saying it was “definitely” or “probably” bad. Among Republicans, though, a third said it was “definitely good” with three-quarters saying it was at least “probably” good.

[...]

Fox News host Maria Bartiromo asked him what he meant by it in an interview on Sunday, again framing it in the context of the concerns raised by outside observers. Trump said that he’d offered the idea “in jest.”

But also: “I’m going to close the border and we’re going to drill, baby, drill, that’s all,” he said. “And then after that, I’m not going to be a dictator.”

Did he mean executive orders, Bartiromo pressed? In response, Trump praised executive orders in general and suggested that President Biden was the one undercutting democracy.

In other words, he doesn’t really know. Think of it less as a plan than as an aspiration.

And yeah, he relished that controversy, even after after saying those remarkrs were in jest, because "a lot of people like it":

Whether or not he was kidding about bringing a tyrannical end to our 248-year experiment in democracy, I ask him, Don’t you see why many Americans see such talk of dictatorship as contrary to our most cherished principles? Trump says no. Quite the opposite, he insists. “I think a lot of people like it.”

And yeah, the pattern repeats. Pundits are now commenting what Trump could have possibly meant by 'You won't have to do it anymore'. Perhaps he'll explain again on Fox News, although thus far he appears not have done so in this case. Reuters on July 27:

Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump told Christians on Friday that if they vote for him this November, "in four years, you don't have to vote again. We'll have it fixed so good, you're not gonna have to vote." [...]

Trump campaign spokesperson Steven Cheung did not directly address Trump's remarks when asked to clarify them.

Cheung said Trump "was talking about uniting this country," and blamed "the divisive political environment" on the attempted assassination of Trump two weeks ago.

And yeah, Reuters also made the connection with previous "dictator for a day" issue, if you wonder about whether it's just me who thinks that's relevant...

So, if you buy the official clarification (which Reuters decided wasn't really a clarification), perhaps the Trump campaign favored interpretation [thus far] is that the US will be so united (in their thoughts/wants) under/after Trump that nobody will need to vote anymore. Of course, whether that's hyperbole as well...

N.B. WaPo's more recent (than Reuters') article quoted that more fully (and unlike Reuters did not declare it to be non-direct clarification):

Asked to clarify what Trump meant, Steven Cheung, a spokesperson for the campaign, said in a statement on Saturday that the former president “was talking about uniting this country and bringing prosperity to every American, as opposed to the divisive political environment that has sowed so much division and even resulted in an assassination attempt.”

Interestingly, WaPo also points out it wasn't the first remark of this (narrowly construed) kind by Trump:

In front of a different Christian audience last month, Trump made a similar suggestion about Christians not needing to vote after this year’s election.

At a Faith and Freedom Coalition event in Washington, the former president said Christians “don’t vote as much as they should.”

“Do you know the power you have if you would vote? … You’ve got to get out and vote, just this time. I don’t care — in four years, you don’t have to vote, okay? In four years, don’t vote,” he said. “I don’t care by that time, but we’ll have it all straightened out, so it’ll be much different.”

But if Democrats were to come into power, he said at the time, “they’ll ruin it [and] we’ll have to do this all over again.”

Erica De Bruin, a professor of government at Hamilton College whose research focuses on civil-military relations, civil war and policing, said, “Trump frequently makes these kinds of deliberately ambiguous statements that can be interpreted in multiple ways.” But she added that “to understand what another Trump presidency would involve, I think it is more useful to look at his past behavior than to attempt to parse what might be the ‘true meaning’ of any individual set of remarks he makes.” [...]

A related fact (perhaps) is that Trump essentially has said he was the best president ever (or at least “far greater than Ronald Reagan” ... mkay, he predicated that with "if his name weren’t Trump") and his (younger and/or less educated) supporters appear to believe it. When Trump made that kind of statement he substantiated it with his judicial nominees and his record on the environment and regulations. Reportedly his supporters plan a far greater overhaul of Washington if Trump gets re-elected, although interestingly Trump has recently claimed little knowledge of the latter.

In a broader context, it's probably no different of how Trump e.g. appears to promise he'll end all wars in world. Although he's deft enough not to claim he said something like that himself, but that e.g. [Hungary's PM] Viktor Orban said that about Trump. (Aside, this is common of how Trump introduces some such statements: "I hear people say..." etc.)

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Update-ish: although these are not an official clarifications from Trump's campaign, but just from his many supporters, some sites deemed them newsworthy:

New Hampshire Gov. Chris Sununu [R] on Sunday dismissed Republican president nominee Donald Trump’s statement Friday telling people they “won’t have to vote anymore” if they elect him as standard Trump rhetoric. “I think it was a classic Trumpism if you will,” he said to host Martha Raddatz on ABC’s “This Week.” [...]

“Obviously we want everybody to vote in all elections, but I think he was just trying to make a hyberbolic point that it can be fixed as long as he gets back into office and all that,” Sununu said.

(Wikipedia describes Sununu as a "reluctant" Trump supporter.) And

Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.) said Sunday that President Trump was “obviously making a joke” when he urged Christian voters to vote for him in November and that, if they do, they “won’t have to vote anymore” because “everything” will be “fixed.”

“I think he’s obviously making a joke about how bad things had been under Joe Biden, and how good they’ll be if we send President Trump back to the White House so we can turn the country around,” Cotton said in an interview on CNN’s “State of the Union.”

(Wikipedia describes Cotton as a "Trump loyalist".)

So, we have similar explainers as for "dictator for a day", except these don't come straight from Trump's official campaign, but from his supporters (of all shades).

Answer 7

I am not interested in opinions, speculations, interpretations, or mind-reading. I am looking for factual sources that explain how he intends to make good on this promise.

The problem with this requirement is that a major aspect of his style is a kind of abstract or impressionist word 'painting'. If you read transcripts of his speeches, he very often fails to complete his thoughts as he meanders. He creates the impression that he is communicating something specific but different people have different ideas of what that is, and rightly so. The actual words defy non-ambiguous interpretation. This has been reported to be a major challenge for translators. Typically, they would determine what point was being made and turn that into corresponding idiomatic text in the target language. But an incomplete sentence lacking explicit detail as to what point is being made is not really translatable in that way. I'm not sure if this is on purpose or not, but it seems to work to his advantage with many of his supporters. They can take away different, even contradictory understanding, and all believe they agree with what he said.

Even when an excerpt of one of his speeches might seem clear, it's an error to assume that he meant any particular literal interpretation you might take from it. As such, there's no definitive answer to this. The only way to make sense of it is to look at the context and his relationship with the audience. And if we do that, I think we can come up with a reasonable assumption about what he probably meant and how it was understood by the majority of the audience.

Trump's selling point to evangelicals is that he has and will pack federal courts with conservative judges. This is something we know he knows. He's said things to evangelicals in the past that the reason they will vote for him is "judges". And frankly, this is one promise he did deliver on during his presidency. Federal judges are appointed (not elected) and once in place, removing them is no simple matter. I think that's what he's talking about. Once conservative courts are 'protecting' the country from the 'libs', the evangelicals will no longer have to worry so much about the details of who holds elected office. Another potential way some might see this is related to a belief that Trump may be able to bring on the 'end times' in which case, there will be no more elections anywhere, but I find the idea that Trump was thinking along those lines a bit implausible.

To be clear, though, this is just what he's selling to this particular group, and we can't take more than that away from it. It's also the case that he made many claims in his winning candidacy which were unrealistic and unsurprisingly never came to fruition. TLDR; Trump says lots of words, most of which have little to no specific content. Him saying he will do something or that he won't do something has limited use in predicting his future actions.

Answer 8

I have not found any evidence about Trump's plans on this topic beyond the existing answers, but I'd like to add an interpretation which has as much merit as any. Culture war issues regularly turn out votes while the politicians vociferously advocating those positions usually either pass legislation that has no impact due to [previously] long-held judicial norms or fail to pass meaningful legislation to those ends.

Former President Trump and Speaker McConnell delivered a 6-3 conservative majority on the Supreme Court which has since ruled in many significant ways to advance the cause of these culture warriors. Trump may be saying, in effect, 'you won't have to vote because I will deliver so much as to make culture-war voting moot.'

Personally, I believe that the scandal is the point; running the news cycle with bad press allows him to blame the media for unfavorable coverage while decrying breathless liberal commentators as deranged alarmists. To do so, he needs his supporters to hear what they want to hear in his statements, so the ambiguity is a feature.

Answer 9

I am not defending Trump for seeming to suggest that if he wins this will be the last free election because once in power Trump and Republicans will pass laws and apply force to prevent ever losing an election again. But here are two other interpretations.

1. Trump is saying that he and the Republicans if elected to power will make America so great for everyone that they will be rewarded with easy vote wins in the future so that a full Christian vote will no longer be required. (That Trump knows or should know that his Presidency will not have that excellent result is irrelevant, all that matters is getting a full Christian turnout to win this election.)

2. Once elected new laws will be passed and actions will be taken so that election rigging and voter fraud (none of which happened in any meaningful way, but still claimed falsely by Trump) will be stopped so that the true Trump majority will win future elections without needing full Christian voter turnout.