Donald Trump has fueled his presidential campaign with innuendo, half-truths and threats. Then he moves on to the outright lies.
The American public has been witness to this tactic from his run to earn the Republican Party nomination on through the final month of his general election campaign in his effort to defeat Hillary Clinton for the White House.
Previous attempts to rally support by belittling and targeting his opponents or playing to what Trump perceives as the fears voters face have now given way to a new, more disturbing claim:
The election is rigged – if he loses.
Here’s what the candidate tweeted out on Oct. 16: “The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary — but also at many polling places — SAD.”
He followed that up with another tweet on Monday: “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!”
And, of course, earlier this year, he claimed that the federal government was letting people into the country illegally to vote. At the risking of sounding like a Trump tweet — Utter nonsense!
Given the chance to back off these remarks and others at Wednesday’s debate, Trump instead continued to blame the media and hold himself apart from the choice American voters face next month.
Trump isn’t satisfied with arguing against Clinton; he wants to delegitimize her very candidacy. On Wednesday, he argued Clinton “shouldn’t be allowed to run. It’s crooked — she’s — she’s guilty of a very, very serious crime (with the government emails she unwisely handled through her personal account). She should not be allowed to run. And just in that respect, I say it’s rigged.”
Asked whether he would accept the election results — as his running mate, Mike Pence and his daughter, Ivanka, said he would — Trump remained unwilling to say so. “I will look at it at the time,” he told people watching the debate in Las Vegas and at home. “I will keep you in suspense.”
His opponent then articulated what many Americans were saying to themselves at that moment.
“That’s horrifying,” Clinton said. “Let’s be clear about what he is saying and what that means. He is denigrating — he is talking down our democracy. And I am appalled that someone who is the nominee of one of our two major parties would take that position.”
To assert that some mysterious cabal is rigging a national election is preposterous, a scenario in which the Republican candidate and those sharing this view have no facts to back the inflammatory allegation. What Trump is doing, however, is planting a dark seed of doubt, one that serves to create cracks in the foundation of our republic and the democratic process of orderly and peaceful elections.
Trump’s stance flies in the face of our history, one where the losers have accepted the system’s results, even in heated contest such as Kennedy and Nixon campaign in 1960 or Bush and Gore election of 2000.
U.S. elections are the template for peaceful transfer of power that the rest of the world envies.
As Trey Grayson, president of the Northern Kentucky Chamber of Commerce and Kentucky’s former secretary of state, said in a New York Times story, “What is great about America is that we change our leaders at the ballot box, not by bullets.”
These false claims by Trump have their roots in suspicions of voter fraud, a vague alarm that the Republican Party has sounded for years. Here, too, there has been little in the way of substance. For example, a 2014 study found just 31 possible instances over 14 years of elections, with a total of 1 billion votes cast.
“Voter fraud is so incredibly rare that it has no impact on the integrity of our elections,” said Wendy Weiser, who heads the democracy program at the Brennan Center for Justice at New York University. “You are more likely to be struck by lightning, more likely to see a UFO, than to be a victim of voter fraud.”
Trump seems to have a deep-seated personal need to be the winner, always. Therefore, if he can claim that the election was rigged, he can continue to portray himself ultimately as a winner — or, more to the point, as a non-loser.
What the American public has to understand is that the truth about voter fraud or rigged elections (or many other issues) carries little weight with Trump as he wages his campaign. It remains imperative that rational people across the political spectrum, as well as news organizations, do not allow this candidate to make our election system another victim of his torched-earth presidential run.