With the “Rigged Election” Card, Trump Will Wreak Havoc on the U.S. After November
And we are already seeing the contours of their latest attempt to make that victory illegitimate. Donald Trump has announced that he believes the election results will be invalid if Clinton wins. He told Sean Hannity that “November 8th, we’d better be careful, because that election’s going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it’s going to be taken away from us…I’ve been hearing about it for a long time.”Sean Hannity and Newt Gingrich explained the whole nefarious plan to the Fox News audience. Hannity drew upon the complaints by Bernie Sanders that the Democratic primary was rigged by the use of Superdelegates (it wasn’t, Clinton would have won without them) and made some wild charges about the election being stolen from Mitt Romney in Philadelphia back in 2012. (Those charges were thoroughly refuted by a Philadelphia election inspector.) Gingrich answered without directly accusing Clinton of rigging the vote by using Trumpish weasel words saying, “if you assume that she’s a crook, as he says, if you assume that she lies, as he says, why would you expect her to have an honest election?” advertisement CNN’s Brian Stelter took issue with Hannity’s handling of the issue rightly pointing out, “suggesting an election is going to be stolen? This is third-world dictatorship stuff.” Indeed it is. But then the voter fraud myth has been flogged by the right wing for decades now despite no evidence that it exists. Trump has begun building up his argument based upon recent court rulings against certain onerous Voter ID laws — laws that actually are “rigging” elections by suppressing Democratic votes.