Senator Jefferson Beauregard Sessions III has signed onto Donald Trump’s continuing campaign ploy, claiming that the president election is being “rigged.” Yahoo News National Correspondent Holly Bailey was on hand covering the Trump rally today in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, and tweeting what she was hearing. Senator Sessions preceded Rudi Giuliani on stage, saying at one point, “They are attempting to rig this election.”
Great. A U.S. senator had added his voice to the growing Trumptanic chorus in support of the Republican presidential nominee’s inflammatory claims that he won’t win only because the election is rigged. It’s not that the majority of voters finds Trump’s ideas and behavior tiresome, repulsive, hateful, and scary. Nah. The only way the Democrats can win, according to this line of “reasoning” is by cheating. Conspiracy theories about how this will be achieved abound on Twitter and darker places on the internet.
Since August, Trump has been saying, and Sessions has been hinting, the election might be stolen. But this time the neo-Confederate senator from Alabama said it outright in support of a candidate who just said in that same Portsmouth rally that Hillary Clinton must have been on some kind of drug during the second debate, and that both she and he should be tested before the third debate next Wednesday.
The incitement is clear. If an election is rigged, then there is no reason to accept the results. It should be overturned. And while most of the Trumplodytes who respond to such framing are mere armchair fanatics, it only takes a violent few here and there to wreak havoc. Not even close to being capable of a coup, certainly, but still a menace to people whom they target as being the root of what they consider America’s decline: people of color, uppity women, lesbians and gays, Muslims, and furriners who don’t speak good ‘murican.
Shameful behavior on the part of Sessions. A call-out to the mob. And delivered with a straight face.