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http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-rigged-election-226588
Why Trump says it's all 'rigged'
Facing a difficult stretch and daunting electoral map, the GOP nominee lands on a safe talking point, a rallying cry — and an excuse.
By Eli Stokols
08/02/16 06:26 PM EDT
Updated 08/02/16 10:50 PM EDT
"Have you heard the one about how the election is already “rigged” against Donald Trump?
At his past three rallies, the Republican nominee has been wedging a new riff into the usual stump speech celebrations of poll numbers and ratings, laments about the country’s decline, promises of a border wall and complaints about everything from the “dishonest” media to crying babies.
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It started Monday afternoon in Columbus, Ohio, where Trump held his first rally after a weekend off the campaign trail and sought to shift the focus away from four days of controversy over his response to a Gold Star family who criticized him at last week’s Democratic convention.
“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest,” Trump said at the rally. He repeated the riff Monday night at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and again Tuesday morning onstage in Ashburn, Virginia. "We gotta beat a totally dishonest machine," he said, pointing to the lack of federal charges against Hillary Clinton after the FBI investigation into her use of a private email server as another data point buttressing his broader case. "It’s a disgrace to our country that she got away with it. It's a crooked system. We're running against a rigged system, and we're running against a dishonest media."..."
Read more: http://www.politico.com/story/2016/08/donald-trump-rigged-election-226588#ixzz4Gbp3jALq
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TRUMP ADVISER ROGER STONE GETTING READY TO 'CREATE A CONSTITUTIONAL CRISIS'
Trump adviser Roger Stone issued has issued a warning.
In a podcast last week, long-time Trump advisor Roger Stone said that if the election results in November don't match opinion polls, the Republican nominee should challenge the validity of the election and warned that the unrest could end in a "bloodbath".
Of course, the problem now is that the polls all show Trump losing. Badly.
No longer able to find polls that support the myth of a Trump lead, or even of a close race, Trump has been citing increasingly aging polls. For the first time, Trump even talked about his lead in “internal polling,” despite mocking the idea of internal polling in the past.
And even though the previous threat was to throw a fit if the results didn’t match, the deeper Donald Trump sinks in the polls, the more the word "rigged” appears at Trump’s rallies.
If Donald Trump can’t win, will he try to flip over the board?
At a rally on Monday Mr Trump said he was afraid that the November election "is going to be rigged" - backing up his statement by saying it was something he was hearing "more and more".
In a television interview, he repeated the warning.
"November 8th, we'd better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged," he said. "And I hope the Republicans are watching closely, or it's going to be taken away from us."
If Trump has begun a heavy push on the idea that the election won’t be fair, Trump adviser Roger Stone has gone way past that point. Stone is making the assumption that the election will be rigged, that any Trump loss can only happen by trickery, and he’s preparing for what comes after the “stolen election.”
In a conversation between Roger Stone and Alex Jones (a combination that could generate more conspiracy theories in 15 minutes than a convention on ancient astronauts), Stone is preparing the idea that Trump’s followers won’t tolerate his loss.
STONE: Well you have to let them know in advance that you’re not going to stand for it. That if there’s any solid evidence of election irregularities you’re prepared to challenge her swearing in and create a constitutional crisis.
Stone has not just been declaring that Democrats are going to steal the election, but insisting that Khizr Khan is a terrorist agent, and that Paul Ryan is secretly working for Hillary. Voter fraud is rampant! Everyone is agin’ ‘em! It’s all a conspiracy! Bengazemailkhanillarry!
But while Trump and Stone are laying the groundwork for Trump-can’t-lose-he-can-only-be-cheated, President Obama has a different view.
“I think all of us at some points in our lives have played sports or maybe just played in a schoolyard or sandbox, and sometimes folks if they lose, they complain they got cheated,” Obama said. “But I’ve never heard of somebody complaining about being cheated before the game was over. Or before the score is even tallied.”
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