Do they have any “Make America Great Again” hats made out of tinfoil? They would fit right in with Donald Trump’s campaign. We begin today’s roundup with The New York Times and an editorial on Trump’s claims of “voter fraud”:
“Help me stop Crooked Hillary from rigging this election!” says the application form on his campaign website.
There are so many lies and delusions flowing daily from the Trump campaign that it’s easy to miss the times when the Republican nominee is being not just ludicrous, but dangerous. This is one. [...]
A more immediate concern is what happens on Nov. 8, when squads of Trump volunteers fan out to defend their candidate’s presumed victory. It does not seem far-fetched to expect that signatures will be pointlessly challenged and citizens intimidated and inconvenienced, that the ruckus of the Trump campaign will spread to polling places around the country.
Todd Purdum at Vanity Fair:
However you try to slice it, and Trump has sliced it several ways, reputable experts across the political spectrum agree that it would be essentially impossible to deliberately or systemically alter the outcome of a national election. [...]
With his ominous warnings that “certain sections” of Pennsylvania—where he is behind by high single digits, by the way—would hand Clinton the election, Trump is also playing on Republican fears that urban black precincts are hotbeds of fraudulent voting. But a much bigger problem in such districts is understaffed polling places, with outmoded equipment, where voters are often discouraged from casting ballots because they are forced to wait in long lines. Trump’s campaign has talked of recruiting “observers” to monitor polling places, though such observers have often been used in the past to intimidate legitimate would-be voters.
Here’s The St. Louis Post-Dispatch on the matter:
Pennsylvania Republicans know full well the demographic changes that have turned their state blue in national elections. That’s why in 2012 they passed a voter-identification law requiring photo IDs to vote. The only chance to win was to suppress the growing black and Hispanic vote, as Republican state Rep. Mike Turzai inadvertently admitted when he boasted that voter ID “is gonna allow Gov. (Mitt) Romney to win the state of Pennsylvania.”
Romney lost by five points. In 2014, a state judge threw out the Pennsylvania voter ID law, saying there was no evidence of voter fraud.
Now comes Trump, who doesn’t need evidence to make scurrilous charges and who appears to be summoning the dark forces of paranoia and intolerance to his own ends. His list of horribles grows ever longer.
And a letter to the editor in Pennsylvania’s Tribune Review:
All Pennsylvanians should feel insulted by Donald Trump telling us that if he doesn't win in our state, it is because of cheating. His comment is ironic coming from a man who reportedly cheated on his women, in his golf games and in his dealings with some of the Trump University students.
Trump is a hypersensitive narcissist who reminds many of a pouting child. I am a registered Republican and a conservative, and I find it impossible to understand how Trump won the nomination.
Mary Shirey Ross
Even Richard Cohen chimes in:
Trump, like a kid playing with matches, can start a conflagration. The GOP has already done considerable damage to the faith Americans once had in their government. It is time for the party to say, “Enough!” Republicans who have been on the fence about Trump — party leaders such as the occasionally principled Reince Priebus — have got to call a halt to this nonsense. Their enduring concern is too narrow. They should worry more about their country and less about their party. [...]
Trump has identified no one and probably would rather run a media empire than the federal government. But his amorphous charges of cheating, of fraud, of rigged elections threaten to delegitimize not just a Clinton presidency but also a system that not only works, but works well. It is not Clinton or her supporters who are the culprits here, it is cowed Republicans instead. Their silence is the dagger.
Eric Levitz at New York Magazine points out that Trump’s preemptive claims of “fraud!” are a natural extension of Republican politics:
For over a decade, the GOP has attempted to solve its problem with minority voters by enacting electoral reforms that reduce their presence at the polls. To rationalize such anti-democratic reforms, the party invented a crisis of democratic legitimacy. One year after McCain’s remarks about ACORN, a Public Policy Polling survey found a majority of Republicans believed the organization had stolen the election for Barack Obama.
Now, as Trump attempts to rationalize his potential loss by hyping that same fictional crisis, “principled conservatives” are performing their outrage. The least they could do is perform their shame.
David Graham calls the conspiracies regarding Hillary Clinton’s health the “birtherism” of 2016:
The fact that there’s no evidence for serious ailments plaguing Clinton is not an impediment to these conspiracy theories; it’s essential to them. In the absence of evidence, campaign surrogates can espouse the theories on television and elsewhere, under the old guise of “just asking questions.” This is a favorite Trump trick. He doesn’t know whether Ted Cruz’s father was implicated in the Kennedy assassination, but he saw a story saying that in the National Enquirer and he’s just asking some questions. Or, to connect this back to the birther issue, Trump doesn’t know that Barack Obama wasn’t born in the United States, but there are some fishy things, and he’s just asking whether there’s any evidence he wasn’t. [...]
Political tactics like this—there’s a delightfully filthy term for it—make for fun for operatives, and they can produce some mayhem, but they seldom win elections, especially at a national level. The birther movement reached a huge range of people; as recently as this month, a plurality of Republicans in an NBC News poll disagreed with the assertion that Obama was born in the United States. The movement may have greased the skids for Trump, too. But it didn’t have much luck stopping Obama, who won two terms.
And, on a final note, here’s Eugene Robinson’s write-up of Trump’s latest failed “pivot”:
Donald Trump’s “pivot,” desperately hoped for by sane Republicans, was over before it began. He couldn’t pretend to be inclusive and statesmanlike for two days in a row if his life depended on it. [...]
Poor [campaign manager] Conway had better get used to explaining what her candidate must have meant as opposed to what he actually said. She also should get accustomed to the fact that Trump will frequently make her into a liar. “He doesn’t hurl personal insults,” she said Sunday — but then Trump took to Twitter. Within hours, he had slung a personal insult at a regular guest on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” (not me). And Monday morning, he lobbed even nastier personal insults at the show’s co-hosts. Whatever, Donald.
Trump’s pivot turned out to be a 360-degree pirouette: back into the mud, where he feels most at home.
I’ve said it before: Trump is not going to change. No matter how many times he reshuffles his campaign, he is who he is. It’s delusional to pretend otherwise.