Last weekend a man who was getting a head start on Halloween attended a University of Wisconsin football game in a costume that depicted Barack Obama with a noose around his neck.
.. He has modeled contempt for civilized norms and even the rule of law, endorsing violence against protesters, expressing admiration for a Russian autocrat, pledging a clampdown on the press, suggesting that Second Amendment enthusiasts might want to take a shot at Clinton, and promising to throw her in jail.
.. But I can’t identify a single issue like that, domestic or foreign, in 2016, because no campaign in my adult lifetime has turned so little on policy and so much on character.
.. it feels as if we’re coming out of this election with four parties:
- the Paul Ryan Republicans,
- the Freedom Caucus,
- the establishment Democrats and
- the Elizabeth Warren/Bernie Sanders brigade,
which is raring to use the muscle that Sanders flexed during the primaries for legislation more progressive than anything that the House would ever approve.
.. Trump prophesies a “constitutional crisis.” Republicans raise the specters of “impeachment” and “indictment.” And Rudy Giuliani demands an assurance from Obama that he won’t pardon Clinton, who is favored to win even though only 47 percent of the people who are planning to vote for her can muster any considerable enthusiasm about it.
The Debate in One Scary Answer
Trump was refusing to acknowledge it was even possible for him to lose a fair fight. At one point, he announced the election was rigged because Hillary Clinton was in it.
.. Only one thing matters. The man says he won’t promise to accept the results of the election. All those establishment Republicans who’ve been hoping to get through this ordeal by just being quiet and looking sad have got some work to do. Fast.
Trump: The “Rigged Election”
But any points Trump might have scored down the debate’s home stretch were negated when Wallace broached the topic Trump has hammered in recent days: a “rigged election.” The Republican nominee refused to say he would accept the results on November 8, promising only that he would examine them “at the time.” When Wallace reminded Trump of America’s tradition of peaceful transitions of power, and pressed for a more specific answer, Trump replied: ”I’ll keep you in suspense.”
.. In other words, any Trump claim of a stolen election will not require alleging a couple hundred fraudulent votes in one key swing state, the way the 2000 election came down to Florida. It will require alleging tens of thousands of fraudulent votes, perhaps hundreds of thousands, in each of four or five key swing states, most of whom have Republican secretaries of state who are overseeing the elections process and sworn to protect the integrity of the ballot. In other words, Trump will argue that our voting system was flooded with close to a million or perhaps more than a million illegitimate votes for Hillary Clinton across several states. Arguing that the 2016 election was stolen will require believing in vote fraud on a massive scale, going on underneath the noses of hundreds of poll watchers, polling place workers — or with the complicity of all of these officials.
It will be a vast conspiracy theory for the ages.
The Trump Afterlife
The Republican nominee’s base is senior citizens, not the testosterone-addled young. How many of them are actually ready to rumble at Roger Stone’s command? If the answer is “not very many,” then you could easily imagine Trump overplaying his hand in an anti-concession speech, and inadvertently revealing that his right-wing populism is more virtual, more reality-television, than the 1930s variety.