Donald Trump spearheaded the racist fiction that our President was foreign-born in order to delegitimize and weaken the Obama Administration, while simultaneously calling attention to himself. But if you think Trump plans merely to transition from “birther” in 2014 to “rigger” in 2018, you miss the critical threat we face today. He knows what the polls say. His rigging claim is not meant to give him cover for losing, or weaken the first woman president once that happens. It’s to change the outcome by blocking enough pro-Clinton votes from being cast or counted.
Think about lynch mobs. The participants typically believed (or at least claimed) that their violence was defending law and order. They were restoring justice. The lynch mob whips up some hysterical story about an attack or insult, and until the mob has its way, the normal rules of civilization no longer apply. When Trump claims the election is rigged, he is urging his supporters toward frenzy and illegality. By saying, in effect, “The Democrats started it,” Donald Trump is implicitly justifying vote tampering wherever his supporters can get away with it. And Trump is calling explicitly for intimidating displays of force everywhere else. Does he object to what his supporters might do? No! Apparently any method is fine with him, he tells us, “If I win.” This is beyond disgusting. It’s disqualifying.
We’ve dealt with years of voter suppression by law: voter ID laws that target minorities, insufficient polling stations by design with three-hour lines for heavily Democratic areas, limited voting hours, voter roll purges, etc. This year, Donald Trump is literally calling for red-shirted thugs to converge on polling stations and stare down voters his side doesn’t like. Worse than that, he claims as fact that the tallies themselves will be rigged. Can’t we hear that dog whistle? He is claiming that our side does it (we don’t), in order to imply that his side should do it, too. It would be terrifying if even 10% of Trump supporters believed the counting is rigged. Surveys say the number is over 40%.
Lynching was intentionally brazen for the purpose of intimidating and marginalizing whole communities. It became an epidemic that killed thousands. The “Strange Fruit” that Billie Holiday sang about in 1939 was the dead bodies of lynch victims hanging from trees. This election, Trump and his surrogates stand for voter suppression, voter intimidation, and a “saying-but-not-saying” call for ballot box tampering, all in the name of restoring greatness. Trumpism threatens a new kind of “Strange Fruit” at the ballot box. Our democracy has not been in such danger for generations.
The solution, of course, is common sense vigilance and massive turnout. Winning by a whisker is not enough. We need Independents and Republicans loyal to our democracy to join us. Back on August 5, I asked Do Republicans Still Supporting Trump have a Red Line? We are way past any possible red line now (as I would like to remind Marco Rubio, John McCain, and Paul Ryan). We need a tamper-proof, challenge-proof, excuse-proof, thunderous hammering of Donald Trump on Election Day, by the good old method of one person, one vote.