Donald Trump has been laying down the angry orange bricks on the road to it-only-counts-if-I-win, and for the second time in as many days, he’s returned to the idea that the election itself is rigged.
RUCKER: Although, there’s a tradition in this country of when somebody loses an election, they concede graciously and try to get their supporters on board like Al Gore did in 2000. Would you? You know if some reason Hillary were to win narrowly, would you contest that in some way?
TRUMP: I don’t want to jump the gun. I don’t want to talk about that. I’m just saying that I wouldn’t be surprised if the election . . . there’s a lot of dirty pool played at the election, meaning the election is rigged. I would not be surprised. The voter ID, they’re fighting as hard as you can fight so that that they don’t have to show voter ID. So, what’s the purpose of that? How many times is a person going to vote during the day? If you don’t have voter ID . . .
RUCKER: Do you think someone can vote multiple times?
TRUMP: Multiple times. How about like 10 times. Why not? If you don’t have voter ID, you can just keep voting and voting and voting.
Multiple studies have shown that voter fraud isn’t a problem. In fact, no study has shown that voter fraud is an actual problem. Though you wouldn’t know that from The Washington Post’s Philip Rucker, who makes no effort to correct Trump’s claims of an unfair election, or to follow up on the extraordinary claim of voters casting 10 votes.
But Republicans have spent more than a decade building up the idea of rampant voter fraud in order to justify a system of voter ID they could use to suppress the vote of minorities. They’ve started the false narrative and fed this fear carefully. As he’s done in so many other areas, Trump is only taking the story Republicans have already been telling to its logical extreme: If voter fraud is so bad, then no election can be trusted. And if no election can be trusted, then losing an election isn’t the end. It's the beginning.
Roger Stone sat with Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos, and the two discussed how the general election will almost certainly be hijacked by acts of voter fraud. …
“I think we have widespread voter fraud, but the first thing that Trump needs to do is begin talking about it constantly,” Stone said. “If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.”
What Trump is doing with voter fraud is an extension of what he’s done with the racism, misogyny, and anti-science policies of the Republican Party. Trump didn’t invent the dog whistles, he just blew them up into fog horns. So it shouldn’t be surprising that he’s doing the same with voter fraud.
If voter fraud is as bad as Republicans have been claiming all along … why accept any results? Why not call for … something else.
“… it will be a bloodbath… We will not stand for it.”