Trump is rigging his own failure
Business Inside.com
Donald Trump says if he loses the presidential election, it will have been “rigged.”
He’s been using the word for months. During the Florida primary in March, he tweeted that state Republican officials and Marco Rubio were “trying to rig the vote.”
Before the New York primary, Trump complained of “a rigged system.” He said the way Republican delegates were chosen in Colorado was “a crooked deal.”
And after Trump lost the Wisconsin primary to Ted Cruz, his campaign issued a statement that read, in, part, “Ted Cruz is worse than a puppet-he is a Trojan horse, being used by the party bosses attempting to steal the nomination from Mr. Trump.”
Media observers challenged his claims. As the GOP convention approached, Michael Cantrell wrote, “Trump might have a solid case about primaries being rigged if he managed to lose his home state by a significant margin, but seeing as how that didn’t happen, and how he’s in the lead, I highly doubt there’s a conspiracy going down to rob him of the nomination.” Cantrell writes for the website Young Conservatives.
Trump won the Republican presidential nomination anyway, even though he thought the system was, in his words, “100 percent crooked.” Yet even after the GOP convention, he “claimed that the Republican nomination would have been stolen from him had he not won by significant margins,” according to the website Conservative Read.
Of late, Trump is picking different targets. McClatchy DC reported he is “accusing Hillary Clinton and the Democrats of trying to stifle viewership for the presidential debates by scheduling them during NFL games this fall,” even though the debates “were scheduled in September 2015 by the same private, non-partisan commission that has organized presidential debates since 1988.” At that time, Trump was just another Republican candidate in a field of 17.
Now we have Trump using the R-word about November’s general election, saying, "I'm afraid the election's going to be rigged. I have to be honest.”
Trump seems to think everything that doesn’t go his way or might not go his way is rigged. Jim Geraghty, writing in the National Review, reports that in June, Trump said the economy is “rigged by big donors who want to keep wages down.”
Geraghty continues, “In July, he concluded that the FBI’s decision to not recommend criminal charges against Hillary Clinton was ‘the best evidence ever that we’ve seen that our system is absolutely, totally rigged.’”
As for the media, Trump tweeted Sunday, “If the disgusting and corrupt media covered me honestly and didn’t put false meaning into the words I say, I would be beating Hillary by 20 percent.”
Eighteen years ago, Hillary Clinton spoke of a “vast right-wing conspiracy” to engulf her and her husband, then-President Bill Clinton, in scandals. Trump has gone her two better: a conspiracy by Republicans to deny him the presidential nomination, a conspiracy by a non-partisan organization to put him at a disadvantage in the presidential debates, and a conspiracy by Democrats to defeat him in the general election.
Geraghty suggests Trump’s attitude is a symptom of a broader problem: “No one ever just loses anymore. There are no honest defeats.”
He continues, “The philosophy of the disgruntled toddler has taken root, far and wide, across the political spectrum: ‘If I win, the game was fair. If I lose, the only possible explanation is that the other guy cheated.’” (I added the italics for emphasis).
This polarization contaminates political discourse, especially in social media. When Clinton is criticized, a frequent response is “Yeah, but Trump did/said A” etc. When Trump is criticized, it’s “Yeah, but Hillary did/said Z” etc.
That’s just one step up from “I know you are, but what am I?” because it doesn’t address the criticisms. Rather, it deflects attention from them.
Fortunately, there’s plenty of time to pay attention between now and November.