Elections Aren’t the Only Things Trump Thinks Are Rigged

(Bloomberg Opinion) -- About two weeks before Election Day in 2016, Donald Trump was campaigning in his signature way. He accused Speaker of the House Paul Ryan, a Republican, of colluding with Hillary Clinton to get her elected president. His campaign website warned of fraud: “Help Me Stop Crooked Hillary From Rigging This Election!” He invoked the specter of deceased Democrats voting from the grave. “You have 1.8 million people who are dead, who are registered to vote, and some of them absolutely vote,” he said on TV. “Now, tell me how they do that.”

Trump hatchet man Roger Stone, a future felon, launched a nonprofit group, Stop the Steal, to police polling sites on Election Day. “If there’s real evidence of electoral fraud then it’d be un-American of [Trump] to not challenge the results,” Stone told Politico. Trump’s running mate, Mike Pence, chimed in: “Voter fraud cannot be tolerated by anyone in this nation.” Trump flooded Twitter with conspiracy theories: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day,” he tweeted on Oct. 17, 2016. “Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naïve.”

This was an unusual amount of flame-throwing for a presidential candidate, especially one whose campaign was already soliciting Russia’s help to skew the election. “Historians say Trump’s sustained effort to call the process into question has no close parallel in past elections,” NBC News noted back then. “And some are increasingly worried that his claims — for which he’s offered no real evidence — could leave many of his supporters unwilling to accept the election results, potentially triggering violence and dangerously undermining faith in American democracy.”

Trump is at it again.

He and his minions have disrupted the operations of the U.S. Postal Service throughout the year, potentially undermining mail-in voting. He and Attorney General William Barr have repeatedly asserted, with no evidence whatsoever, that mail-in balloting is riddled with fraud and subject to manipulation by foreign powers. He predicted the Supreme Court will rule on the outcome of a contested November election and said the Senate should replace the late Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg posthaste so a new justice could break any tie.

Back in July, Trump tweeted that he might delay the election because it was going to be the “most INACCURATE & FRAUDULENT Election in history.” (He lacks the power to postpone an election, but never mind.) A couple of weeks before that, he told Fox News that he wouldn’t commit to accepting Election Day results. “I have to see,” he said. “No, I’m not going to just say ‘yes.’ I’m not going to say ‘no.’ And I didn’t last time, either.”

Trump revisited that thought Wednesday evening during a White House news conference, when a reporter asked him if he would accept the results on Election Day and a peaceful transfer of power. “We’re going to have to see what happens. You know that. I’ve been complaining very strongly about the ballots and the ballots are a disaster,” he said. “We want to get rid of the ballots, and you’ll have a very, we’ll have a very peaceful — there won’t be a transfer, frankly. There’ll be a continuation.”

Boom. Social media exploded, just as it had in July. The discontent amplified enough that even Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took to Twitter on Thursday morning to reassure voters that “there will be an orderly transition just as there has been every four years since 1792.” Later in the day, the Senate unanimously passed a resolution reaffirming its commitment to “the orderly and peaceful transfer of power.” None of this fazed Trump. He simply upped the ante Thursday afternoon while taking reporters’ questions on the White House lawn.

“Mr. President, are the election results only legitimate if you win?” he was asked.

“So we have to be very careful with the ballots.  The ballots — that’s a whole big scam,” he replied. “We want to make sure the election is honest, and I’m not sure that it can be.”

It’s worth worrying about how deeply Trump is corrupting the election, of course — and monitoring him closely. After all, he’s corrupted many of the people around him, including his own children. And, as Barton Gellman pointed out in a meticulously reported and provocative feature in the Atlantic this week, Trump has powerful tools at his disposal to try to upend the results — on and well after Election Day. My colleague Jonathan Bernstein sorts through Gellman’s key conclusions here, including how willing Republicans in swing states would be to assist a Trump coup.

But amid all the hand-wringing over what he may or may not do, don’t let Trump snatch away your own agency and attention. David Axelrod, as canny and experienced a political observer as there is, reminded everyone not to get overly distracted by Trump’s performance art. “You do wonder if the POTUS would sooner have us talking about his outrageous comments on the election than the 202,000 dead of COVID-19 or the 870,000 additional Americans who filed for unemployment this week,” he tweeted.

Axelrod might be giving Trump too much credit. The president doesn’t think strategically. He thinks like a toddler.

When Trump amassed billions of dollars of debt he couldn’t repay in the early 1990s, he ran to his wealthy father and siblings to help bail him out. As things snowballed, he carped publicly about how poorly banks and investors were treating him. They weren’t taking away his hotels, airline, casinos, yacht and other properties because that’s what they did to deadbeats — they were doing it because they had suspect motives and weren’t loyal. His reality TV show never received an Emmy — not because the show was awful, but because the awards were unfair.

So it goes with his re-election bid, albeit with much more significant stakes. Trump wants to pretend the system is stacked against him because he knows he’s in danger of losing, perhaps badly. In 2016, his claims of a rigged election reached a crescendo when polls suggested he would lose. It can’t be his fault, and he can’t be a failure, if everything and everyone around him conspires against him.

I suspect Trump is also aware that if he is forced to exit the White House and lose its protections, he’s more vulnerable to fraud investigations that imperil him and his children. It’s likely that has him on edge, too.

So expect Trump to remain in overdrive, seeding the waters with tumult. But don’t let him scare you. Take a cue from the mourners on the steps of the Supreme Court who greeted his appearance at Ginsburg’s casket on Thursday with loud chants of “vote him out.” One way to discipline toddlers who can’t control what they say and do — especially when they’re trying to ravage democracy — is to give them a very long timeout.

This column does not necessarily reflect the opinion of the editorial board or Bloomberg LP and its owners.

Timothy L. O'Brien is a senior columnist for Bloomberg Opinion.

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