Trump’s stunning claim: Election in US will be rigged
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REPUBLICAN presidential nominee Donald Trump has suggested that he fears the US general election “is going to be rigged” — an unprecedented assertion by a modern presidential candidate.
Trump’s extraordinary claim — one he did not back up with any immediate evidence — would, if it became more than just an offhand comment, seem to threaten the tradition of peacefully contested elections and challenge the very essence of a “fair” democratic process.
“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest,” the Republican nominee told a town hall crowd in Columbus, Ohio, on Monday. He added he has been hearing “more and more” that the election may not be contested fairly. He did not elaborate.
Trump made the claim after first suggesting that the Democrats had fixed their primary system so Hillary Clinton could defeat Bernie Sanders.
Trump has previously backed up that thought by pointing to hacked emails from the national party that appeared to indicate a preference for Clinton. Still, the former secretary of state received 3.7 million more votes than Sanders nationwide and had established a clear lead in delegates by March 1.
The celebrity businessman — who has been known to dabble in conspiracy theories, including claims that President Barack Obama was not born in the United States and, more recently, that Senator Ted Cruz’s father was an associate of President John F Kennedy’s assassin — also claimed that the Republican nomination would have been stolen from him had he not won by significant margins.
He then asserted that November’s general election may not be on the up-and-up.
He repeated the charge on Monday night on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity,” saying: “November 8th, we’d better be careful, because that election is going to be rigged. And I hope the Republicans are watching closely or it’s going to be taken away from us.”
Trump has not been shy about asserting that the electoral process is “rigged.”
It became a frequent catchphrase of his during a low-water mark of his primary campaign this spring, when forces allied with Cruz managed to pack state delegations with supporters of the Texas senator. Trump also asserted that the Republican Party had changed the delegate allocation in the Florida primary to favor a native candidate, like Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio, at Trump’s expense.
In recent weeks, in an effort to woo angry Sanders supporters, Trump has made the claim that the Democrats’ process was also rigged. On Monday night, Trump said Sanders “made a deal with the devil,” and said of Clinton, “She’s the devil.”
The event in Ohio was Trump’s first campaign appearance since the onset of his tussle with the parents of a slain Army veteran, but he did not address the flap.
He spoke for nearly an hour on Monday in Columbus, but did not mention his criticism of Khizr and Ghazala Khan, Muslims whose son was killed in Iraq in 2004.
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