Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort went straight to the Kenyan-born, terrorist-palling heart of the problem.
Given the president's background with the “Chicago machine,” Donald Trump campaign chairman Paul Manafort said Friday, he was surprised to hear Barack Obama’s incredulous response to the notion that November’s presidential election might be rigged.
It’s apparently a truism in Trump circles that Barack Obama couldn’t have won in 2008 or 2012 were it not for dead people in Chicago voting over and over again … in Ohio, Virginia, Pennsylvania, and North Carolina. Those are some motivated zombies.
Manfort is an actual expert on campaign rigging—after all, he worked to do just that for pro-Russian forces in Ukraine. So you’d think when he started making accusations of rigging, he’d at least have a working theory for how it could be done.
Even as the Trump campaign is planning its big remodel into Generic Conservative Republican for Generic 1 Percent President, Trump is still blowing the rigged trumpet. That doesn’t imply the greatest faith in the campaign retooling effort.
Trump has long been fond of suggesting that the “system” is hostile to him in favor of both his Republican primary opponents and now Hillary Clinton. But the Manhattan billionaire took those allegations to a new level this week, suggesting for the first time that the general election itself will be “rigged” against him.
But not even Republicans are buying what Trump and Manafort are selling.
Last week, Donald Trump began telling his supporters, in both media appearances and stump speeches, that not only are polls that show him trailing being manipulated (after all, how could any honest poll not show him winning?) but also the election itself is going to be “rigged,” so that his victory will be stolen from him by the powers that be. This idea is ludicrous for a number of reasons, and it’s dangerous because of the delegitimizing effect it could have on the system and the eventual possible presidency of Hillary Clinton. But how far is this idea going to spread? Is Trump going to get help from conservatives in the media? Is he going to convince his supporters that the election is being stolen?
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Trump talks about both kinds of problems, in his typically scattershot way. He says that unless we have voter-ID laws, people “are going to vote 10 times,” and if he thinks that’s possible, it suggests that he has never actually voted. But he never specifies exactly how the “rigged” system is going to be deployed against him, or who’s in on the conspiracy. And it would have to be quite a conspiracy in order to swing the election against him. For instance, if you look just at the battleground states where the election will be decided, you see an awful lot of Republicans in charge of administering the election. For instance, the chief election official in Ohio, Jon Husted, is a Republican. So is Ken Detzner, the secretary of state in Florida. So is Paul Pate, the secretary of state in Iowa. So is Barbara Cegavske, the secretary of state in Nevada. I could go on, but does Trump think all these Republicans overseeing elections in key states are in cahoots to elect Hillary Clinton?
President Obama also commented on Trump's preemptive whining.
Asked about Trump’s fear of election rigging during a Thursday press conference at the Pentagon, the president said, “Of course the election will not be rigged” and dismissed the GOP nominee’s claims as little more than a “conspiracy theory.” An exasperated Obama continued that Trump’s allegation of election rigging “doesn’t make any sense. I don’t think anybody would take that seriously.”
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Obama said he had never heard of someone complaining of cheating “before the game was over” and suggested, “If Mr. Trump is up 10 or 15 points on Election Day, and then loses, then I think maybe he can raise some questions.”
