The man who cried rigged: the problem with Trump’s election claims.By Jonathan Freedland
The Guardian UK
October 17, 2016
The thing you need to know about Donald Trump is that he never loses. Never. Whether it’s in business or politics, Trump either wins outright or he was going to win until victory was stolen from him, usually through a crooked conspiracy of his enemies.
That’s why his assorted bankruptcies and collapses were never his fault, why even his multimillion-dollar failures were actually successes. It’s why, when his TV show, The Apprentice, failed to win an Emmy, it was proof not that the programme was lacking but that the Emmys themselves were unfair, “all politics” and “horrendous”.
Trump signalled that he would apply this same approach to his bid for the White House at the earliest opportunity. In February, Iowa held its caucuses, marking the traditional start to the primary process whereby each party chooses its candidate for president. Trump came second, losing to the Texas senator Ted Cruz. No one was very surprised. Cruz is a Christian conservative, and Iowa’s Republicans often pick Christian conservatives. Trump was a thrice-married New Yorker more familiar with mammon than with God. But to Trump there could be only one explanation.
“Ted Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it,” Trump tweeted. “That is why all of the polls were so wrong and why he got far more votes than anticipated. Bad!” Forty-five minutes later, Trump tweeted again: “Based on the fraud committed by Senator Ted Cruz during the Iowa Caucus, either a new election should take place or Cruz results nullified.”
The basis of this claim was a release by the Cruz campaign falsely notifying Iowans that rival conservative candidate Ben Carson had dropped out of the race and urging Carson supporters to back Cruz instead. It might have been an innocent mistake or perhaps a dirty trick, typical of primary season. Either way, it was enough to allow Trump to claim he was robbed – and to give the US a glimpse of Trump’s modus operandi. When he loses, he claims immediately that the game is rigged.
He’s doing it again now. His current stump speech alternates between claiming that the women accusing him of sexual assault were too unattractive for him to abuse and warning his supporters that the Democrats and the press are colluding to steal the presidency from him. As he tweeted on Sunday: “The election is absolutely being rigged by the dishonest and distorted media pushing Crooked Hillary – but also at many polling places – SAD.”
Some Democrats take a kind of perverse comfort in the fact that Trump is banging this drum again. It’s a sure sign he thinks he’s losing. (The last time he talked of ballot rigging was in August, when Hillary Clinton opened up a big lead.) It seems to be his way of getting his excuses in early, ensuring that no one brands him a loser on 9 November.
Trump might also be laying the ground for a post-election career in which he sets himself up as the champion of a diehard Trumpian rump within the Republican party or perhaps as the head of a new media empire – Trump News Network – that will outflank Fox News on the hard right. Either way, he understands that there is no more potent variety of political rocketfuel than a righteous sense of grievance. Trump is priming those who are now crying “Lock her up!” to bellow “We was robbed!”
But this comes at a cost that has made plenty of Americans – Republicans among them – anxious. Central to the self-image of the US is its status as a self-governing democracy. Election fraud is meant to be something that happens in other countries, with the US casting itself as monitor or even referee, determining which overseas ballots are free, fair and legitimate. Trump’s claims, pre-emptively challenging the integrity of a presidential election, seek to upend that notion, challenging the legitimacy of America’s own system. And they seem to be striking a chord: one survey released on Monday found that 41% of Americans believe the election could be stolen from Trump.
Read on at
https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/oct/17/man-who-cried-rigged-problem-with-trump-election-claims
