Vox has a good review of the possible consequences of Trump’s “it’s rigged”. And unlike Bernie, Trump will likely do little to calm down the Trump-shit crazy who will be a in a mean mood. These people don’t wear lime green T shirts, boo, turn their backs, complain about “microagressions” and disappear for four years. The Trump-shit crazy have guns.
Their inauguration will be a rhetorical, and when I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath. The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in. No, we will not stand for it.
I see a lot of articles lately acting like Trump “contesting” the election will be a big deal, and cause a Constitutional crisis.
It won’t.
It will be a sore loser already tossed in his grave, laying on his belly and digging downward, and nothing more.
The process is actually clear…each state will verify their results, select their Electors who will cast their votes which will be read into the record in the House, and Hillary will be the new President.
Some people were saying that he will have grounds because he lost. Sorry, but merely losing doesn’t automatically grant him standing…he has to show he actually has a case with at least something passing as evidence. “I should win because I am a raging narcissist and think I should win everything” isn’t a case.
We saw with the Sanders campaign how paranoid allegations of elections being “rigged” have an absurd power of their own. Trump’s “rigged” allegations are basically the same, and although I am a Sanders fan, this particular aspect of his legacy is extremely damaging.
There is a much more fundamental argument that needs to addressed here, which is that in a large part of the country there is a basic presumption of illegitimacy against any Democratic president. Somehow, this democratically damaging presumption has to be discussed and brought into the light, and Republican politicians have to be called out for stoking/exploiting it through bad faith arguments about birth certificates, voting irregularities, impeachable lies, locker her up, etc. Here’s a narrative that I would suggest is necessary and correct: that anyone advancing a bogus delegitimizing argument should be called “anti-democratic” or “unAmerican” or something of that kind. Suggestions welcome.
Honestly, Democrats need to agree with him on this, for their own reasons, by saying, “Yes, for this election, we need paper, and not electronic, ballots nationwide.”
To a certain extent, Bernie had a point regarding the primaries, but he never said that the actual elections were rigged. When he talked about the system being rigged, he was talking about the DNC and their set up which the emails proved. Things like the problems accessing DNC resources, and the fact that Wasserman-Schultz didn’t tell the media to stop using the Super Delegate vote counts in their numbers created problems for the Bernie campaign. And he went on to try and fix many of those problems inside the DNC (the party apparatus should be completely neutral during a primary, and that includes the Super Delegates).
The thing is, Trump is reviving something the GOP used against Clinton back in 2000. They claimed that she got tons of ‘illegal’ immigrants on the voter roles so that she could steal the Senatorial election that year.
The next logical step for Trump is to specifically target officials in charge of election procedures in battleground states. I see him at rallies specifically naming persons he suspects of prepping to conduct corrupt polling. Various Secs of State are being teed up I’d wager. If it’s not being done publicly he certainly has campaign staff, lawyers and surrogates browbeating and threatening them right now.
No, it’s not less crazy. The Republican drive for voter-ID and similar laws was never about fraud. It was always about keeping Democrats from voting. Few of the “mainstream” Republicans really want to go out on a limb saying that the vote is rigged, because they know it will get sawed off behind them.
Actually, Republicans and Democrats are equally divided. Large proportions of the members of each party believe cheating occured when the other sided wins.
Just before the [2012] election, we asked a national sample of respondents about the likelihood of voter fraud if their preferred presidential candidate did not win. About 50% said fraud would have been very or somewhat likely. When asked if someone was using “dirty tricks” in the election, about 85% believed that some candidate, campaign or political group was.
These sentiments are not driven by members of one party or the other: Near equal numbers of Republicans and Democrats (between 40% and 50%) said fraud would be very or somewhat likely. Each side believes that if they lose, cheating is to blame, and they believe it about equally
This is such a crock of shit. Among myriad reasons why it’s a crock of shit, some already mentioned above, is the fact that Trump is from New York - a state that has NEVER had any Voter ID laws.
