As their nominee unravels, Republicans worry where his scorched-earth, rigged-election rhetoric leads the GOP and the country.
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.
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