By Jose A. DelReal and Sean Sullivan
October 27 at 7:05 PM
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/facing-potential-loss-trump-expands-the-list-of-conspirators-plotting-against-him/2016/10/27/7177c1ba-9ba8-11e6-9980-50913d68eacb_story.htmlDonald Trump’s claim that the 2016 presidential election is “rigged” against him has become a central part of his closing argument to voters in the final days of the campaign, as the GOP nominee insists that a growing range of “corrupt” public institutions are to blame for his sharply narrowing path the White House.
As he heads into a potential loss on Nov. 8, Trump has expanded the scale and scope of his accusations to include Democratic rival Hillary Clinton, the media, establishment leaders from both parties and unidentified “global financial powers.”
“When the people who control the political power in our society can rig investigations like [Clinton’s] investigation was rigged, can rig polls, you see the phony polls, and rig the media, they can wield absolute power over your life, your economy and your country and benefit big-time by it,” Trump told a crowd this week in St. Augustine, Fla. “They control what you hear and what you don’t hear, what is covered, how it’s covered, even if it’s covered at all.”
The “power structure” he describes, according to a review of his speeches this week, includes banking institutions, the judiciary, media conglomerates, voting security experts, Democratic tricksters, scientific polling and also perhaps military leaders. He has also accused Clinton of meeting “with international banks to plot the destruction of U.S. sovereignty to enrich these global financial powers, her special-interest friends and her donors.”
By emphasizing such rhetoric, the GOP nominee — who has a history of circulating unsubstantiated accusations — has sown distrust in basic democratic institutions among his supporters.
A USA Today/Suffolk University poll released this week found that more than two-thirds of Trump supporters think the election results could be manipulated and 43 percent say corruption will be to blame if he loses.“It’s a rigged system like Donald says, it really is,” Kelly Brooks of Mooresville, N.C., said at a Trump rally in her state this week. “I think it’s intentionally rigged, 100 percent. They don’t like Donald Trump. They don’t like change, they want to do things the way they’ve been doing them for a long time.”
But many critics are concerned by the extent to which Trump is relying on grand conspiracies to explain away his electoral troubles, including some who hear unnerving echoes of historically anti-Semitic rhetoric in Trump’s references to global elites and nefarious bankers.
Jonathan Greenblatt, director and chief executive of the Anti-Defamation League, said
Trump’s references to the collusion of global banking elites sound as though they are “straight out of the Protocols of Zion,” an infamous anti-Semitic tract. Greenblatt said that he does not know whether Trump has used this language intentionally, but sees similar language and conspiracies circulated on anti-Semitic sites and blogs.
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