Throughout the campaign, Donald Trump repeatedly charged that the election was being rigged against him. In a presidential debate just before the election, he was asked whether he would concede if he lost the election. "We're going to have to see,” he said. “I will keep you in suspense.” Later he clarified, saying he would accept the results, “… if I win.”
These are, in themselves, shocking and irresponsible statements. Trump is saying that the election results are legitimate only if he approves them, which is another way of saying that he does not trust the process. He is not just declaring that the process might be untrustworthy. He is telling his supporters only he deserves their trust, not the election process itself.
Throughout the election Trump made various claims, all without evidence, that the election was being rigged against him. A fearful political establishment, he said, was planning massive voter fraud. Trump encouraged his supporters to turn out at polling places to “monitor” the voting.
A “rigged election” is one in which there is a top-down and intentional attempt to manipulate the results of the election. This is different from “electoral fraud” (which I’ll explore in a future post) in which some number of votes may have been falsified but the scam has not been perpetrated by people at the head of the campaign.
Experts say that in all of American history, there has not been a single instance of a truly rigged presidential election. Laura Belmonte, history professor at Oklahoma State University, said that although there have been disputed elections and claims of illegal voting in the past, no other presidential candidate has ever systematically questioned the results in advance of the vote.
Worse, even after the election and continuing to the present, Trump has been declaring that he also won the popular vote, which he, in fact, lost by nearly 3 million votes. As far as I can see, the only reason he might have for insisting he won the popular vote is sheer vanity, which is strong evidence that he does not even understand the deep threat to democracy of his words alone.
Trump has convinced his supporters. Before the election only half of Republicans said they would accept Clinton as their president and nearly 70 percent said a Clinton victory would be because of illegal voting or other mischief. And there were multiple threats of violence if Clinton won. As late as last month half of Republicans believed that Trump had won the popular election.
Refusal to believe election results questions the very legitimacy of government. This represents a far worse problem than the mistrust in the US government that is already widespread. Such refusal undercuts the essence of American democracy: elections matter, that my vote counts, that my representatives attempt to represent me. Bernie Sanders has written that Trump’s message is that “the only person in America who stands for the American people, the only person in America who is telling the truth, the only person in America who gets it right is the president of the United States, Donald Trump.” That message takes us a long way down the road toward authoritarianism (dictionary: “strict obedience to authority at the expense of personal freedom”). Once we no longer believe that our elections are free and fair, once we lose trust in our democracy, we are far more vulnerable to the demagogue (dictionary: a leader who makes use of popular prejudices and false claims and promises in order to gain power).
What might happen as more and more people disbelieve election results? (I’ll have to explore that later, too.)
This President either does not understand or does not care how deeply his words impact the legitimacy of our democracy; or he (or his advisors) understand quite well and are happy to subvert the democratic process.
Note: In writing
about such complex and far-reaching issues, the blog format makes it impossible to follow all the threads in any one post. There will be many unanswered
questions in each post. As we go along, however,
I will try to get back to each thread eventually and link to the original post.
