Donald Trump, a man who has managed to say horrible things about women, immigrants, black people, Muslims, veterans...well, let's just say nearly everyone, while demonstrating an immense lack of understanding regarding foreign and domestic policy (or even the English language), while also showing he is thin skinned and wildly temperamental, assumes that the only way he can lose an election to be president of the the U.S.A. is because it was stolen from him.
Trump has been laying the groundwork for a "rigged election" for a while. During the third and final presidential debate, Hillary Clinton went through a history of Trump claiming contests were rigged against him, back through the primaries and even into the Emmys. Trump lashed out against the Emmys when his Apprentice reality show did not win an award, as is his style(1).
When the floodgates opened(2) with claims of sexual assaults against Trump, he lashed out against the media(3):
Trump, who spent the week launching tirades at Clinton, journalists and his own party, continued on Sunday to portray himself as the victim. He tweeted: “Polls close, but can you believe I lost large numbers of women voters based on made up events THAT NEVER HAPPENED. Media rigging election!”
In another post, he said: “Election is being rigged by the media, in a coordinated effort with the Clinton campaign, by putting stories that never happened into news!”
Trump's surrogates have gone out and promoted this claim as well, even as Republican officials try to downplay the storm.
Former Speaker of the House, Newt Gingrich (a proto-tea partier who organized the Contract With America in the 1990s and led two government shut-downs during Bill Clinton's presidency), said on ABC's "This Week" program, "I remember when Richard Nixon had the election stolen in 1960, and no serious historian doubts that Illinois and Texas were stolen. So to suggest that, we have, you don't have theft in Philadelphia is to deny reality."(4)
Rudy Giuliani, the former mayor of the New York City who has burned through any goodwill he had from 2001, continued the attacks(5):
Giuliani claimed, without evidence, that Pennsylvania Democrats bussed voters in from Camden, New Jersey, and that “dead people generally vote for Democrats”. To back up his claims of voter fraud, he said the Republican president of the New York Yankees had stopped bussing voters around the deeply Democratic city’s boroughs.
“To tell me that I think the election in Philadelphia and Chicago is going to be fair, I would have to be a moron to say that,” Giuliani said. “I would have to dislearn everything I learned in 40 years of being a politician.”
The claims about Philadelphia appear to be drawn from a conspiracy theory born in 2012 after Mitt Romney failed to win a single vote in 59 almost wholly black precincts of its 1,687 total. Obama won 85% of the city, 52% of Pennsylvania, and 93% of black voters nationwide.
Conversely, he could not win a single vote in whole counties in deeply conservative Utah that year. John McCain failed to win votes in Chicago and Atlanta precincts in 2008.
Philadelphia’s Republican party and an investigation by the city’s Inquirer newspaper found claims of fraud or wrongdoing were baseless, and larger studies have found cases of in-person voter fraud have been exceedingly rare over the last six years.
Giuliani and Trump, however, have continued to argue that it does exist, and blamed “inner cities”, which Giuliani said Republicans “don’t control”.
Philadelphia, a place near and dear to my heart and one I would be happy to share the virtues of, is one of a growing number of minority majority cities. In other words, white people make up less than 50% of the population. As of 2010 census, non-Hispanic white people made up 41% of the population. It is stupid to assume that a city with a majority of ethnic minorities would support a party that routinely opposes policies which support and nurture diversity, let alone a candidate like Donald Trump.
While Republicans may have paved the way over the years for Donald Trump (you can connect the alt-right white nationalist conservative movement back to the tea party movement, which can be traced back to the Gingrich-led impeachment movement, which can be traced back to the moral majority movement, and so on), they have also raised concerns over Trump's claims of a rigged election(6):
“What this would be is an assault on the foundations of the long-established traditions of the country, an assault on democracy, vandalizing it,” said Steve Schmidt, the Republican strategist who led John McCain’s 2008 campaign. “It would be incumbent finally on national leaders in the Republican Party to speak clearly, unequivocally about not just the situation, but the totality of it.”
Ari Fleischer, who worked for George W. Bush on the 2000 campaign and later as his White House press secretary, contrasted how “Al Gore graciously accepted the outcome” to Trump’s rhetoric that has him “disgusted.”
“If he never calls to concede, he’ll go down as one of the sorest of sore losers,” Fleischer said, but “if Donald Trump loses and fights the outcome, it will make many of his followers, which means millions of people, question the legitimacy of our American government. That’s destructive and corrosive.”
Tony Fratto, a former aide to George W. Bush, said, “You hate to have to fight something like this, but it is very corrosive, so you do have to fight it. You don’t want it to even pick up with a small segment of the population. Reince [Priebus, the Republican National Committee chairman] and Ryan and McConnell will have to concede for him, for the party. They just have to take things out of his hands.”
Hillary Clinton's campaign is also concerned that Trump is agitating his supporters, who may in turn try to take matters into their own hands(7):
Hillary Clinton’s advisers are privately worried that Trump’s calls for his supporters to stand watch at polling places in cities such as Philadelphia for any hint of fraud will result in intimidation tactics that might threaten her supporters and suppress the votes of African Americans and other minorities.
The Democratic nominee’s campaign is recruiting and training hundreds of lawyers to fan out across the country, protecting people’s right to vote and documenting any signs of foul play, according to several people with knowledge of the plans.
“I’m very concerned about this rhetoric,” said former Philadelphia mayor Michael Nutter (D), a Clinton supporter. “All Donald Trump is doing with these outrageous, false scare tactics is to try to diminish voter interest and suppress voter turnout.”
Election officials, including Republican secretaries of state, were also rushing to repudiate Trump’s unsubstantiated claim Monday that fraudulent activity is already underway.
“Any time that your comments draw into question the legitimacy of the elections process, they have crossed the line,” said Ohio Secretary of State Jon Husted, a Republican who supports Trump. “Particularly if you can’t back it up with evidence.”
Trump has done nothing to deescalate the situation, which is not surprising, given his inability to deescalate any problem. When asked by debate moderator Chris Wallace of Fox News if he would accept the results of the election, Trump demurred(8), then claimed the debate itself was rigged(9). I guess the only way the debate wouldn't be rigged against Trump is if all the questions were multiple choice, for example:
HOW BIG IS DONALD TRUMP'S PENIS?
A) TREMENDOUS
B) YUGE
C) BIGLY AND/OR BIG LEAGUE
D) ALL OF THE ABOVE
A day before the debate, Trump hired Mike Roman. Rather than explaining who he is myself, I will allow more polished writers draft the narrative(10):
The Republican nominee has insisted, without evidence, that dead people and undocumented immigrants are voting in the United States.
Trump has long claimed that the 2016 election is rigged but has amplified his claims of voter fraud in recent days. On Monday he tweeted: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!” In particular Trump claimed in an interview with Fox News that voter fraud was rampant in cities including Philadelphia, St Louis and Chicago after long warning vaguely about fraud in “certain communities”.
Multiple sources have confirmed to the Guardian that [Mike] Roman, who also previously ran the Koch network’s now defunct internal intelligence agency, will oversee the Trump campaign’s efforts to monitor polling places for any signs of voter fraud.
[Mike] Roman is best known for his role in promoting a video that showed two members of the New Black Panthers – a fringe group that claims descent from the 1960s radicals – standing outside a Philadelphia polling place dressed in uniforms, with one carrying a nightstick. Police are called and the two men leave.
* * *
The case was eventually dropped but not before it became a conservative cause célèbre. As Rick Hasen, a election law professor at the University of California, Irvine, said: “It was one of the most retold stories on Fox News and the right for years and took on almost mythical status as evidence of thuggery by Democrats
to harm the voting process.”
Hasen, who viewed the case as a “complete tempest in teapot”, said of Roman that he was “somebody who has been more willing to put forth more outrageous statements about voter fraud and election process”. Hasen added: “I don’t consider him a very responsible voice among Republicans on this question and I’m not surprised that Trump would be using him for polling related efforts.”
Trump is allowing his immaturity and vainglory to refuse to acknowledge that there is a pretty good chance he will lose the election. He is now creating agitation in his base, which at best will only lead to distrust, and at worst could create pockets of violence on or after election day. In some instances, Trump's supporters are as blind and deluded as he is(11):
But I spent a couple of hours before the rally in this indoor show ring talking to many Trump supporters and found them in states of denial and fury. I didn’t find one who expects Trump to lose. To varying degrees, most agreed with Trump that the election process is rigged. And some predicted ominous things if Trump loses — if not violence, a mass rejection of the legitimacy of the democratic process.
* * *
The candidate’s reckless closing message that nothing is on the level — not Democrats, not the press, not the polls, not Republican leaders, not even the integrity of the voting process — has left many of his supporters prepared to declare the election results illegitimate.
Presuming he loses, which seems likely, I suspect Trump will not fade away after the election. We can only hope that his November temper tantrum does not carry over through inauguration and into the next four years. I am not hopeful of that, but Graydon Carter, a man who has followed Trump for 30 years as a New York journalist, is more optimistic than I am(12):
He has touched—embraced!—every third rail in American politics. He has offended (and I apologize if I’ve left some group out): African-Americans, Native Americans, Mexicans, Jews, Muslims, war heroes—war heroes!—families of war heroes, the disabled, women, and babies. Babies! Through word or action, Trump has promoted gun violence, bigotry, ignorance, intolerance, lying, and just about everything else that can be wrong with a society. And yet he marches on, playing to a constituency that just doesn’t seem to care. The thing is, this ramshackle campaign, following a ramshackle business career, has exposed his flaws and failures to the world and, more importantly, to the people he will brush up against for the rest of his life. To them he is now officially a joke. I suspect he knows this. And if his thin skin on minor matters is any indication, he will be lashing out with even more vitriol. He is a mad jumble of a man, with a slapdash of a campaign and talking points dredged from the dark corners at the bottom of the Internet. I don’t think he will get to the White House, but just the fact that his carny act has gotten so far along the road will leave the path with a permanent orange stain. Trump, more than even the most craven politicians or entertainers, is a bottomless reservoir of need and desire for attention. He lives off crowd approval. And at a certain point that will dim, as it always does to people like him, and the cameras will turn to some other American novelty. When that attention wanes, he will be left with his press clippings, his dyed hair, his fake tan, and those tiny, tiny fingers.
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SOURCES:
(4) CNN: Trump Ratchets Up 'Rigged Election' Claims, Which Pence Downplays, by Jeremy Diamond and Eugene Scott (October 17, 2016)
(5) See #3
(7) Washington Post: Election Officials Brace for Fallout From Trump’s Claims of a ‘Rigged’ Vote, by Sean Sullivan and Philip Rucker (October 17, 2016)
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