Trump attempting to undermine US election process

The New York Times wrote:Donald Trump, Slipping in Polls, Warns of ‘Stolen Election’
By ASHLEY PARKEROCT. 13, 2016

Donald J. Trump has lashed out at fellow Republicans, calling them “disloyal” and “far more difficult” than Hillary Clinton.

He has griped openly about a “rigged” political system, saying Wednesday that he has “no respect” for the nonpartisan Commission on Presidential Debates, and previously complaining about a “defective” microphone in the first debate.

And on Monday, at a rally in Wilkes-Barre, Pa., he worried that the election could be “stolen” from him and singled out Philadelphia, a city with a large African-American population, warning, “We have to make sure we’re protected.”

Mr. Trump’s ominous claims of a “stolen election” — which he often links to black, urban neighborhoods — are not entirely new. But in recent days, he has been pressing the theme with a fresh intensity, citing everything from the potential for Election Day fraud to news media bias favoring Mrs. Clinton to rigged debates.

The assertions — which coincide with Mr. Trump’s decline in the polls after a shaky performance in the first debate and accusations that he forced himself on women — highlight concerns that he may not accept a Clinton victory, breaking from the traditional decorum of defeated presidential candidates and undermining the legitimacy of the election result.

At rallies in recent days, Mr. Trump has become a candidate full of excuses, perhaps the clearest manifestation of his frustration with his current standing in the polls and the growing alarm in his campaign that a White House victory is slipping away.

On Monday, on a trip through Pennsylvania, Mr. Trump began the day urging the almost entirely white crowd outside Pittsburgh to show up to vote, warning about “other communities” that could hijack his victory.

“So important that you watch other communities, because we don’t want this election stolen from us,” he said. “We do not want this election stolen.”

Later, at the evening rally in Wilkes-Barre, Mr. Trump raised more concerns about voting fraud. “I just hear such reports about Philadelphia,” he said. “I hear these horror shows, and we have to make sure that this election is not stolen from us and is not taken away from us.”

He added for emphasis: “Everybody knows what I’m talking about.”

The crowd chanted an anti-CNN epithet as Mr. Trump attacked the “crooked media.”

At a rally in West Palm Beach, Fla., on Thursday, Mr. Trump said that, “This election will determine whether we remain a free nation or only the illusion of democracy,” suggesting that the system was “in fact controlled by a small handful of global special interests, rigging the system.” He continued, “And our system is rigged.”

The country has not had a presidential candidate from one of the two major parties try to cast doubt on the entire democratic process and system of government since the brink of the Civil War, said Douglas Brinkley, a presidential historian at Rice University.

“I haven’t seen it since 1860, this threat of delegitimizing the federal government, and Trump is trying to say our entire government is corrupt and the whole system is rigged,” Mr. Brinkley said. “And that’s a secessionist, revolutionary motif. That’s someone trying to topple the apple cart entirely.”

Roger J. Stone Jr., a close confidant and informal adviser to Mr. Trump, has also highlighted fears of election rigging. In an August column in The Hill, he wrote of voting machine manipulation. And during a panel Saturday at this year’s New Yorker Festival, as he discussed the possibility of such tampering, Mr. Stone hedged when asked whether he would advise Mr. Trump — should he lose in November — to concede the election and accept its legitimacy.

“As long as there is no irrefutable evidence of fraud, yes,” he told his questioner. “He should — unless there is any refutable evidence to the contrary.”

Mr. Stone is one of the people behind Stop The Steal, a movement of 500 volunteers who plan to stand outside what they believe could be “suspect precincts” on Election Day and conduct their own exit polls to compare against voting machine results.

“In an election in which Donald Trump has made it pretty clear that the Clintons are going to prison, I think they would do anything to make sure they win it, even steal it,” Mr. Stone said. But, he added, “Trump cannot just lose and say, ‘They stole it.’ He has to have some tangible evidence — and that’s exactly what we’re trying to collect.”

Democrats fear that Mr. Trump’s accusations, in the short term, will lead to voter suppression — and, in the long term, could encourage huge swaths of Americans to view Mrs. Clinton as an illegitimate president if she is elected.

“He’s using phrases like ‘rigged election’ to incite his followers to rig the election by using tactics like voter intimidation, and I don’t think it’s particularly subtle, and I don’t think he cares about the integrity of our elections,” said Stacey Abrams, the Democratic minority leader of the Georgia House of Representatives.

Ms. Abrams, who is African-American and has worked on voting-rights issues, is also the founder of the New Georgia Project, a voter registration and engagement effort in the state. She said Mr. Trump was employing a “voter intimidation model.”

“Just scare them away from the polling place,” she said. “That’s his crude form of voter suppression — not particularly artful, but effective.”

The Clinton campaign is stressing to supporters that they expect voter participation to be higher and easier than in previous elections — but it has also begun recruiting election lawyers to help with voter protection efforts.

“We are prepared for anything in terms of how he chooses to conduct himself in the closing weeks of this campaign, and that includes what is increasingly looking like a scorched-earth approach,” said Brian Fallon, a spokesman for the Clinton campaign. “He is clearly trying to lay a foundation for challenging the legitimacy of the potential next president, just as he sought to do with the nation’s first African-American president.”

With less than a month until the election, Mr. Trump’s grievances has come fast and furious as he has begun to slip again in the polls.

On Thursday, Mr. Trump also asserted, without offering evidence, that the Obama administration was allowing illegal immigrants to enter the country to vote in November, another example of how he claimed the election was being rigged. “They’re letting people pour into the country so they can go and vote,” Mr. Trump said at a meeting in New York with the National Border Patrol Council, the union of border patrol agents.

There has been no evidence that the administration is delaying deportations of — or intentionally letting in — immigrants so they can vote. (Illegal immigrants are barred from voting in federal elections.)

Mr. Trump’s claims seem to be resonating among his supporters. At a campaign stop in Iowa on Tuesday, a woman stood up and, her voice quavering, said she feared “voter fraud” before offering a stark call to action to Gov. Mike Pence of Indiana, Mr. Trump’s running mate.

“If Hillary Clinton gets in, I myself, I’m ready for a revolution because we can’t have her in,” the woman said.

Mr. Pence has emerged as Mr. Trump’s most loyal defender. But the call to revolt was a step too far for him. “Yeah, don’t say that,” he said, shaking his right hand as if to try to brush away her comment.

He then tried for a more positive spin: “There’s a revolution coming on November the 8th,” he said. “I promise you.”

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sassy wrote:Have you seen this, it's hilarious

Eilzel wrote:He knows he is losing and will lose- just preparing his excuses

Politico wrote:What if Trump won't accept defeat?
As their nominee unravels, Republicans worry where his scorched-earth, rigged-election rhetoric leads the GOP and the country.
By Eli Stokols, 08/22/16 05:01 AM EDT

Donald Trump is on track to lose in November and to refuse to accept the legitimacy of that Election Day result. That’s a problem not just for Hillary Clinton but for both political parties and the country. For everyone, really, other than Donald Trump.

By hiring Breitbart News’ Steve Bannon, a media provocateur in his own image, and accepting the resignation of the man who was supposed to professionalize him, Trump is signaling the final 78 days of his presidential campaign will be guided by a staff that indulges his deeply held conspiracy theories and validates his hermetically sealed worldview.

That includes his insistence that the only way he loses is in a “rigged” election. According to two long-time Trump associates, the notion of a fixed election isn’t just viewed as smart politics inside Trump Tower; it’s something the GOP nominee believes.

“If he loses, [he’ll say] ‘It’s a rigged election.’ If he wins, he’ll say it was rigged and he beat it. And that’s where this is headed no matter what the outcome is,” said one Trump ally. “If Donald Trump loses, he is going to point the finger at the media and the GOP establishment. I can’t really picture him giving a concession speech, whatever the final margin.”

“It’s the same as how he looks at the polls,” said another close Trump confidant. “Any poll that shows him ahead, he likes. Any poll that shows him behind, he thinks it’s rigged.”

Trump began to suggest that the election would be “fixed” last month, as Clinton opened a lead following July’s party conventions. “The only way we can lose, in my opinion — I really mean this, Pennsylvania — is if cheating goes on,” Trump said at a rally in Altoona. Days earlier in Wilmington, North Carolina, he’d warned that without stronger voter identification laws people would be “voting 15 times for Hillary.” The first image of a Trump campaign ad, released on Friday, is that of a polling place as a narrator alleges “the system” is “rigged”; and his campaign has already begun recruiting volunteers to monitor polling places, specifically in urban precincts where African-American voters, very few of whom support Trump, predominate.

Trump’s words are having an effect. Just 38 percent of Trump supporters believe their votes will be counted accurately, and only 49 percent of all registered voters are “very confident” their votes will be tabulated without error, according to a Pew Research survey last week.

The implications — short- and long-term — are serious. Interviews with more than a dozen senior GOP operatives suggest growing panic that Trump’s descent down this alt-right rabbit hole and, beyond that, his efforts to delegitimize the very institutions that undergird American democracy — the media and the electoral process itself — threaten not just their congressional majorities or the party’s survival but, potentially, the stability of the country’s political system.

“We’ve never had a presidential candidate who has questioned the legitimacy of an electoral outcome nationally,” said Dan Senor, who was a foreign policy adviser to Mitt Romney’s 2012 campaign. “This does take us to a whole new world if the actual presidential candidate is questioning the legitimacy of this process, and the damage to our democracy could be substantial.”

In 2008, even as some on the far right questioned Barack Obama’s legitimacy as president based on false suggestions he was not born in America, John McCain conceded quickly. Most notably, after the Supreme Court’s 2001 Bush v. Gore decision, countless Democrats complained that the result was unjust — but Al Gore and Joe Lieberman did not.

“Among the values most necessary for a functioning democracy is the peaceful transition of power that’s gone on uninterrupted since 1797. What enables that is the acceptance of the election’s outcome by the losers,” said Steve Schmidt, the GOP operative who was McCain’s campaign strategist in 2008.

“Here you have a candidate after a terrible three weeks, which has all been self-inflicted, saying the only way we lose is if it’s ‘rigged’ or stolen — in a media culture where people increasingly don’t buy into generally accepted facts and turn to places to have their opinions validated where there’s no wall between extreme and mainstream positions. That’s an assault on some of the pillars that undergird our system. People need to understand just how radical a departure this is from the mean of American politics.”

Should Trump opt not to concede after a loss or deliberately roil his supporters and spark uprisings by refusing to accept the legitimacy of the election results, he would still have little recourse to alter a significant electoral victory for Clinton. Only if the election were close, hinging on one or two states where there were alleged voting irregularities, could Trump seriously contest the result in court.

But beyond who wins the White House in November, many Republicans fear that Trump’s efforts to diminish people’s confidence in mainstream media, fair elections and politics itself will have a lasting impact.

“The damage this is going to do to various institutions is going to be long term,” said Charlie Sykes, a prominent conservative radio host in Milwaukee who has been one of the country’s most outspoken and consistent anti-Trump voices. “How do you restore civil discourse after all of this? He is a postmodern authoritarian who’s in the process of delegitimizing every institution — the media, the ballot box — that can be a check on him.”

Sykes, who is open about his growing discomfort with the increasingly partisan media landscape and reductive, zero-sum political culture he and his more strident cohorts have helped create, views Trump’s talk of “rigged” systems and its subsequent validation and amplification by outlets like Breitbart as “dangerous.”

“There’s a sizable portion of his fan base that will believe these things, and it’s toxic to our democracy,” he continued.
“You’re basically taking ideas and voices that have been on the fringes — justifiably — and Donald Trump is bringing them squarely into the mainstream and weaponizing them. This is something we’ve not had to confront before. At one time there were responsible voices that would have drawn some lines that would have kept these voices from dominating our discourse, and they don’t exist now.”

Having resisted and ultimately rejected efforts by former campaign Chairman Paul Manafort and Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus to control and temper his message, Trump is seemingly rededicating himself to the pugilistic populism, the economic nationalism and ethnic tribalism that have so endeared him to the conservative base — and so limited his appeal beyond it.

Kellyanne Conway, the pollster whose hiring as campaign manager was announced the same day as Bannon’s as campaign CEO, might have given Republicans exasperated by Trump’s inability to pivot a glimmer of confidence that the nominee was tackling one of his biggest problems, a 30-point deficit to Clinton with college-educated white women — if not for Bannon’s plan to “let Trump be Trump,” which is likely to undercut her efforts.

Trump’s late efforts over the weekend to reach an African-American constituency that’s almost entirely written him off illustrate just how unlikely it may be that Trump’s own words will be consistent enough to persuade the skeptics. At a rally in Michigan, he swung from predicting he’d win 95 percent of black voters in a reelection bid (polls show he’ll be lucky to win 5 percent this year) to patronizing them into supporting him. “You're living in poverty, your schools are no good, you have no jobs,” he said. “Fifty-eight percent of your youth is unemployed. What the hell do you have to lose?”

Republicans worry about Trump’s coarseness and his forays into racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny and unconstitutional religious tests coming to define the party itself, especially for a new generation of Americans.

“If the Republican Party wants to be a governing party again, it has to think about how representative it is of the American people as a whole,” said Lanhee Chen, a fellow at Stanford’s Hoover Institution and an adviser to Marco Rubio and other Republicans. “It’s tough to do that when the premise of a campaign seems to be exclusion and separation. I think it’s very hard to get to a place where you have a party that people see as representing all of the diverse interests of the country.”

Chen and others point to one potential silver lining: that thus far in this election cycle, Trumpism has worked only for Trump. Paul Nehlen, whose primary challenge of Speaker Paul Ryan was effectively engineered by Bannon and aided by Breitbart’s daily drumbeat of anti-establishment propaganda, drew a measly 15 percent of the vote on primary day. And mainstream conservative donors have successfully taken out a handful of tea party incumbents in other primaries, demonstrating that parroting Trump’s language may not work for candidates other than Trump.

But these operatives understand that Trump, even if he is humiliated on Election Day, is unlikely to quietly exit the political stage, and his most ardent cheerleaders, unlikely to admit their candidate never had a chance.

“I can’t see the fever swamp, alt-reality media universe on the right learning the lessons of this,” Sykes said. “Can you see Sean Hannity and Laura Ingraham saying, ‘OK, sorry, we screwed up’?”

And many worry that the newly consummated Trump-Breitbart partnership will endure, perhaps in another form — and that both men will be eager to exact revenge.

“What I worry about is that they’re looking past November at forming a different party — that they’ve used the GOP as a vehicle to build this following and that then they just go and build something new,” said Katie Packer, Romney’s deputy campaign manager in 2012 and the leader of an anti-Trump super PAC.

“That’s damaging because some of these people who like Trump should be Republicans. My hope is that if he loses big, anyone who’s not a racist nationalist says ‘Never again’ and the racist nationalists just retreat to their basements where they belong. But my fear is that Bannon and Trump uniting could be about them looking to do something long-term that would ensure this fringe element remains.”

eddie wrote:I actually think though, that Trump has enough nutjob supporters that Clinton should have her security stepped up if she gets in....