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.
Even Trump’s Supporters Are Wary of ‘Rigged’ Rhetoric
Although Trump has campaigned as a candidate who will shake up the system and clean out a corrupt status quo, his most controversial remarks have not been broadsides at the system itself, but rather have been attacks on people: Megyn Kelly, Judge Gonzalo Curiel, Khizr and Ghazala Khan. These personal attacks have earned Trump widespread condemnation, but his inner circle has kept quiet and maintained a stiff upper lip. Even Trump’s attacks on the appearance of the women who have accused him of sexual assault—or on Hillary Clinton’s appearance—have not earned this sort of backlash within the inner ranks.
Maybe that’s not surprising; Trump can, and has, vowed to topple nearly every pillar of American bipartisan foreign-policy consensus, but how many people are really engaged enough to notice and care? But then what makes the attack on elections different?
One possibility is that people like Conway, Pence, Scott, and Husted may support Trump and approve of his assaults on certain elements of the status quo, but they are also at heart political professionals who have spent their life in the arena. It’s one thing to break policy taboos, but it’s a different sort of threat to tear down the entire edifice.
Trump Time Capsule #143: Rigged
The American fabric of peaceful-transfer-of-power is taken for granted in the U.S. and elsewhere but is more fragile than it seems. As I noted back ininstallment #139, nearly every presidential inaugural address through U.S. history has emphasized how unusual and crucial this civic ritual is. For an example you might not have been expecting, I give you Richard Nixon, in the opening of his first inaugural address in 1969:
My fellow Americans, and my fellow citizens of the world community:
I ask you to share with me today the majesty of this moment. In the orderly transfer of power, we celebrate the unity that keeps us free
.. Gore had every reason imaginable to challenge Bush v. Gore and the whole circumstances of the election. He was half a million votes ahead in the nationwide popular vote, and for more than a century the popular-vote winner had become president. The Florida secretary of state, who was in charge of the recount, was co-chairman of the Bush campaign in Florida. The governor of the state, Jeb Bush, was his opponent’s brother! The reasoning of the Supreme Court’s ruling was so nakedly results-oriented that the Court itself said that it should not be taken as a precedent in any future rulings.
Now the U.S. Supreme Court has spoken. Let there be no doubt, while I strongly disagree with the court’s decision, I accept it. I accept the finality of this outcome, which will be ratified next Monday in the Electoral College. And tonight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession.
I also accept my responsibility, which I will discharge unconditionally, to honor the new president-elect and do everything possible to help him bring Americans together in fulfillment of the great vision that our Declaration of Independence defines and that our Constitution affirms and defends.
.. The logic of “birtherism,” with Donald Trump as its most prominent exponent, was that Barack Obama had an illegitimate claim on office.
.. A textbook example is provided by President George Bush Sr., whose concession speech included the following statement: “Here’s the way we see it and the country should see it—that the people have spoken and we respect the majesty of the democratic system. I just called Gov. Clinton over in Little Rock and offered my congratulations. He did run a strong campaign.”
In making this statement, President Bush signaled that the election was over and he lost fair and square.
Elizabeth Warren, Insult Comic
Warren’s focus, speaking at the University of Pennsylvania, was on the seventy per cent of college students who have to take out loans: “The interest rate on these student loans makes billions and billions of dollars for the United States government,” she said. But her real point was, more mundanely, the refusal of more than three Republicans to support a bill she had sponsored that would have allowed student debtors to refinance their loans at forgiving rates. It was the “Republican philosophy in a nutshell,” she said, to favor those seeking to preserve their capital over ordinary people who wanted to get ahead. “The game is rigged,” Warren said, “and the Republicans rigged it.”
.. The image of the rigged game was, after the 2008 financial crisis, Warren’s more than anyone’s, and there was a specificity to it: she was talking about the protections that the banks enjoyed. But in the 2016 Democratic Presidential primary, Bernie Sanders adopted it, more abstractly, to refer to the ways in which life is made difficult for ordinary people, and then Donald Trump began to use it, often to hint that the election was about to be stolen from him.
.. no comedian has developed a convincing caricature of Warren
.. Warren is not a utopian but a leveller, a soldier of comeuppance and retribution.
.. The G.O.P. establishment’s case is that if voters are discontented with their lot, economically and socially, then they should blame liberals and Democrats, who have held cultural and Presidential power for most of the past quarter century. The Democratic response in recent years has been a version of Warren’s response—that the problem was a profoundly rigged economic system that progressive politics have only begun to correct.