At this point, I have little doubt that Hillary Clinton will become the 45th President of the United States.
What’s becoming increasingly uncertain and disconcerting is just how unhinged some of Trump’s hard core supporters have become —
And what they would actually do being egged on by Trump who himself has become increasingly unhinged with his latest over the top claim that Democratic Candidate Hillary Clinton was doped up during the last debate and challenged her to be drug tested before the final debate on Wednesday.
Some folk didn’t take Trump’s candidacy serious from the beginning and now look where we are. I wouldn’t underestimate the bitter fury of folk at the thought of their standard bearer losing. Let’s look back at the 2000 election when angry Bush supporters stormed a Palm Beach County election site threatening to break in and stop the recount.
Some folk have already tried to take matters into their own hands from assaulting anyone who is critical of Donald Trump at his rallies — inside and outside — to plotting terrorist attacks.
Now Politico and the Boston Globe are reporting on the increasingly delusional belief that if Hillary Clinton wins in November, then it would be a result of a rigged election and that perhaps matters need to be taken into their own hands:
When John McCain lost to Barack Obama in 2008, he called to congratulate him “on being elected the next president of the country that we both love” and said “this campaign was and will remain the great honor of my life”…
...Can anyone see Trump saying anything like this if he loses? If he doesn’t, that could upend a bipartisan American tradition and a bedrock of any democracy: the peaceful transition of power. This is something that top officials in both parties have been seriously worried about for months.
Anger and hostility were the most overwhelming sentiments at a Trump rally in Cincinnati last week, a deep sense of frustration, an us-versus-them mentality, and a belief that they are part of an unstoppable and underestimated movement. Unlike many in the country, however, these hard-core Trump followers do not believe the real estate mogul’s misfortunes are of his own making.
They believe what Trump has told them over and over, that this election is rigged, and if he loses, it will be because of a massive conspiracy to take him down.
As a result of these sentiments constantly being drilled into their psyche by Trump the potential consequences can be unnerving and concerning:
At a time when trust in government is at a low point, Trump is actively stoking fears that a core tenet of American democracy is also in peril: that you can trust what happens at the ballot box.
Of course the Boston Globe seems to forget that many also didn’t trust the 2000 results, especially given that many networks, including Fox Cable News called the election for Gore, only to back track and say that it was ‘undecided’. Do I need to remind you of the Bush who was working for Fox News at that time (John Ellis). Not to mention that the Supreme Court took the equally unprecedented course to ‘select’ Bush by overruling Florida’s right to recount those votes.
Yet, despite what happened, folks weren’t willing to burn down the capital over it. After Bush so thoroughly screwed this country from 2001 — 2008, America actually entertained electing an African American for President and did so — twice and that guy will be leaving office with the highest approval ratings of any outgoing President.
Imagine that.
No, instead, some Trump supporters are talking about these actions:
His supporters here said they plan to go to their local precincts to look for illegal immigrants who may attempt to vote…
...And if Trump doesn’t win, some are even openly talking about violent rebellion and assassination, as fantastical and unhinged as that may seem.
“If she’s in office, I hope we can start a coup. She should be in prison or shot. That’s how I feel about it,” Dan Bowman, a 50-year-old contractor, said of Hillary Clinton, the Democratic nominee. “We’re going to have a revolution and take them out of office if that’s what it takes. There’s going to be a lot of bloodshed. But that’s what it’s going to take. . . . I would do whatever I can for my country.”…
...
Above all, Trump is now using the prospect of his loss to undermine faith in democratic institutions.
“It’s one big fix,’’ Trump said Friday afternoon in Greensboro, N.C. “This whole election is being rigged.’’
He saved some of his harshest criticism for the media, which he said is in league with Clinton to steal the election.
“The media is indeed sick, and it’s making our country sick, and we’re going to stop it,” he said.
The Guardian sports an interesting take on all of this violence talk:
Robert Post, a first amendment expert and the dean of Yale Law School, said Clarke’s comments were “horrible and despicable” but that “an American court would view this as venting, basically.”
In 1969, the supreme court overturned a Ku Klux Klan leader’s conviction for inciting violence.
The Brandenburg case set a high bar: “It says that you must intentionally be inciting imminent violence, and it has to be likely that there’s going to be violence.”
Well, given that some folk have acted out on their violence already and many have been threatened and intimidated, one cannot be so sure. Indeed even Paul Ryan and the GOP are now trying to walk back this ‘the election is rigged’ talk coming from Trump:
In a statement, a spokesperson for the highest-ranking elected Republican said Ryan is “fully confident” in the nation’s elections system. It comes on the heels of Trump’s claims that the election is “rigged” against him by “globalist elites,” elements of the federal government, and the press.
“Our democracy relies on confidence in election results, and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity,” said Ryan spokesperson AshLee Strong.
Again from Politico:
Republicans have started warning their increasingly ostracized nominee to stop stoking his supporters with claims that the 2016 election will be stolen, daring him to show proof or put a lid on it…
...Somebody claiming in the election, ‘I was defrauded,’ that isn’t going to cut it,” said former Sen. Kit Bond, a Missouri Republican who earlier in the campaign endorsed Jeb Bush and then Marco Rubio. “They’re going to have to say how, where, why, when.”
“I don’t think leading candidates for the presidency should undercut the process unless you have a really good reason,” Sen. Lindsey Graham, a South Carolina Republican who gained little support for his own 2016 White House run, told POLITICO.
I think the time to have been saying these things was before Trump became the nominee, but this is what the Republican Party gets for trying to kick their own party’s impeding implosion down the road yet again.
Too late. Surely you had to know that you couldn’t keep your power by increasingly relying on a narrow segment of Americans who believe in as many conspiracy theories as they do the words in their Bibles. Instead of establishing reasonable core conservative policies and values and trying to attract a more diverse base of support, you stacked the state houses in an attempt to suppress the vote and moved to the extreme right in policies and deeds to hold on to these folk who now want a coup if Trump is not elected.
You broke it you bought it. Hopefully the vast majority of Americans will stand against this foolishness and support the next President who will be Clinton.
But understand this. If we don’t come together on November 9th, even with a potential Democratic Congress, the 45th President will automatically be off to a very rocky start by having to constantly fight to legitimize her Presidency.
If you haven’t voted, I strongly suggest that you take advantage of early voting in your states and help to get others to the polls early.
Then we seriously need to think about really supporting healing words for this country. Because regardless of your political stance, we got to come together to get stuff done in this country.