Trump challenges legitimacy of election
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump speaks during a campaign rally, Saturday, Oct. 15, 2016, in Portsmouth, N.H.
PORTSMOUTH, N.H. >> A beleaguered Donald Trump sought to undermine the legitimacy of the U.S. presidential election on Saturday, pressing unsubstantiated claims the contest is rigged against him, vowing anew to jail Hillary Clinton if he’s elected and throwing in a wild, baseless insinuation his rival was on drugs in the last debate.
Not even the country’s more than two centuries of peaceful transitions of political leadership were sacrosanct as Trump accused the media and the Clinton campaign of conspiring against him to undermine a free and fair election.
“The election is being rigged by corrupt media pushing completely false allegations and outright lies in an effort to elect her president,” he said, referring to the several women who have come forward in recent days to say that Trump had groped or sexually assaulted them. He has denied the claims, calling the women liars.
Earlier Saturday, Trump took to Twitter to warn that “100% fabricated and made-up charges, pushed strongly by the media and the Clinton Campaign, may poison the minds of the American Voter. FIX!”
“Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted and should be in jail,” he added. “Instead she is running for president in what looks like a rigged election.”
In a country with a history of peaceful political transition, his challenge to the election’s legitimacy — as a way to explain a loss in November, should that happen — was a striking rupture of faith in American democracy.
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It was not the first time Trump has raised the idea the election is unfairly tilted against him, but it has become a resurgent theme for the New York billionaire and many of his supporters in the past several days as he’s slipped in preference polls and faced allegations of sexual misconduct.
Clinton’s campaign manager, Robby Mook, said in a statement that campaigns “should be hard-fought and elections hard-won, but what is fundamental about the American electoral system is that it is free, fair and open to the people.”
“Participation in the system—and particularly voting—should be encouraged, not dismissed or undermined because a candidate is afraid he’s going to lose,” he said.
Trump also suggested at one point Saturday that Clinton had been on drugs during the last debate. Instead of spending the weekend preparing, he said, “I think she’s actually getting pumped up, you want to know the truth.”
“I think we should take a drug test prior to the debate, ‘cause I don’t know what’s going on with her,” he said.
Trump offered no evidence to support the bizarre claim, which he appeared to base on his belief Clinton was energetic at the start of their second debate and downbeat at its conclusion. Nothing about Clinton’s demeanor in the debate suggested she was anything but clean and sober.
74 responses to “Trump challenges legitimacy of election”
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Of course it’s fixed. Martian aliens are posessing the minds of voters against Trump. And Bigfoot creatures are conspiring to vote for Clinton.
LMAO!
Also the limu lady and the creature from Morgan’s corner……
The green lady of Wahiawa too.
I’m pretty sure it’s the Election Troll behind all this. Election Troll hungry, like eat ’em tax returns.
If no feed tax returns, Election Troll very angry, make big trouble for tax return hider, no let tax return hider win. Tax return hider very sad, not glad. Hide tax return very, very baaaaad!
Even a right wing pro abortion voter like has now to shake his head over Trump.
Paranoid much?
Spoiled Brat
Just blame it on drugs; OK, now prove it.
By raising all these issues, officials will have to prove otherwise. In other words, check it out, to give faith in his somewhat believed ‘corrupt’ system.
Example: Dead people voting, people voting in one state then voting in another district multiple times. People voting by absentee ballot then voting at a voter registered center.
Rigged voting system. A scientist proved that a stand-a-lone system could be tampered with to tally all votes for one candidate. Changing out the field-programmable gate array (FPGA)that tally the votes.
Trump is not falling for the ‘old’ political system. Remember Ronald Reagan’s , ‘Trust but verify’ ?
For all we know Obama’s election could have been rigged. 🙂
Do a search. Very little voter fraud has occurred over the years. And totaled, not near enough fraud has been done to even threaten turning an election. Well, except against Al Gore, when Bush was given the Presidency amongst all the chads.
So you admit there are exceptions.
I do have a limited trust in our voting system. I can’t help but question the fraud that occurs on an everyday basis in our country. The Voting officials here in Hawaii vehemently state that our voting system is ‘foolproof’. We’ll see.
It’s nowhere close to some third world country elections where armed guards tell/force people/incentivize people to vote a certain way.
Thank goodness they got rid of the ‘chads’.
Like so many things discussed here, most folks do not operate from a fact basis.
The fact is, that voter fraud, is beyond beyong being statistically minuscule.
Nationwide that rate of voter impersonation is even lower.
Out of the 197 million votes cast for federal candidates between 2002 and 2005, only 40 voters were indicted for voter fraud, according to a Department of Justice study outlined during a 2006 Congressional hearing. Only 26 of those cases, or about .00000013 percent of the votes cast, resulted in convictions or guilty pleas.
Judge Andrew Napolitano says that “if you are an illegal alien in California, get a driver’s license, register to vote, you can vote in local, state, and federal elections in California and those votes count.”
Napolitano explained that in California, when one signs up for a driver’s license, one does not have to prove that they are in America legally. Napolitano explained that “other states… permit registration [to vote] at the time you get a driver’s license, have you go through another procedure in which you have to demonstrate citizenship.”
Hence, legitimacy of the election?
yobo – Mr. Napolitano has been corrected many times about this, but he persists with this unfortunate misinformation. And then you repeat the lie.
Non-citizens will not be automatically registered to vote, as you incorrectly wrote. People will need to attest they’re citizens before being able to register. Undocumented immigrants applying for driver’s licenses, a right they gained last year, will not be offered the option.
Facts are very stubborn.
For all we know, the Truman election could have been rigged. Dewey was defeated by a left wing Democratic conspiracy that was so insidious that even the newspapers didn’t know what was happening. Dewey would have made America Great. Oh yeah, it already was.
…for all we know
Stop you and trump needs to grow up stop acting spoiled brats.
Yobo,going to the elementary school once on voting Saturday is Nuff for me.
WOW!
Electronic voting machines can be rigged without any evidence to prove that votes are not tallied truthfully. These were stated by people who are aware of these machines and what can be done to rig them.
Some say that Bernie lost the democratic nominee to Hillary due to this.
“Some say?” Oh, please.
I heard it thru the grapevine.
Are those the same “some” who say that the USAF is still hiding the fact that Aliens have landed in rural America and teleported Zeke, his brother Fred and his other brother Fred to the mother ship for examination? The “some” who say that Area 51 is a cover-up? The “some” who worry that mysterious black helicopters are landing UN commandos in Northern Idaho to bring about the One World Order? Just checking.
Kuihao and Cellodad never states some say, you guys are to be honored for not believing in some say.
I love sum say with oyster sauce.
To: Bumby “Some say that Bernie lost the democratic nominee to Hillary due to this.” If you were a voting democrat you would know that voting for Bernie was not done on electronic voting machines. Voting in our democratic primary (Hawaii) was by paper ballot, collected and counted on the spot before most of us left the room. No conspiracy theory possible about that.
buddy, that is great. Hawaii elections are of the highest integrity.
I want my absentee ballot already, so I can put in my 8 votes.
You like one of them that much, huh? LOL
Defeated loser. Everyone else is the cause, can’t admit to his shortcomings. Cry wolf.
He sounds desperate. But the real disaster is that the US will end. With Hillary’s open borders we will become as bad a country as most of the rest of the world already is.
How did Americans become such cowards?
Your comments are just so sad.
We..the US…has had OPEN borders for years….from 1776, I believe…why cry now?
They should go back to the old ways of voting where ballots are counted by hand even if it take six months to get the results. Just vote six months early. Nobody but Trump to be blamed for where he stands today,from day one with all his name calling didn’t stand to well as far as i’m concern.
MANIACAL:1 : affected with or suggestive of madness
2 : characterized by ungovernable excitement or frenzy
Very well placed.
Sore pre-loser
(I’m sorry, I just had to chuckle. I’m a writer and I would like your permission to file away the term “pre-loser” to use at a later date. That really is good.)
Go ahead. lol
He no can wait till after he lose big to say it’s fixed.
Mr. Trump is showing the world how a profoundly mentally ill person explains what is looking more and more will be a blowout, landslide loss.
He’s descending further into madness almost every day, as his business is falling apart all around him. Bookings at his hotels are down – evidenced by deep discounting during peak periods and plenty of vacancies – and the value of his name on buildings slides from a positive to a very deep negative.
Good riddance to him.
When Hillary ascends to the throne I hope she has a plan to fix the nightmare that is Obamacare among other Barry Hussein screw-ups. While the Pravda like MSM is busy doing the Clinton’s bidding in smearing her opposition, real problems confront the country. The income inequality gap has never been wider which is puzzling as the democrats have always portrayed themselves as champions of the little guy. Barry Hussein put the Iranian mullah desire to acquire nukes on steroids. He and Hillary have screwed up the remainder of the middle east so thoroughly that not even the pompous John Kerry can’t fix it. If and when Waldo is inaugurated look for further erosion of the bill of rights. That’s the part of our constitution that guarantees free speech and the right to keep and bear arms, among others, for you reality show watching democrat voters.
I believe the American people are fed up. It’s going to be another BREXIT phenomenon like England.
A survey by Connecticut-based Quinnipiac University shows 71 percent of American voters are “dissatisfied” with the way things are going in the United States.
It’s the economy, jobs, immigration, healthcare, trade, and foreign policies that the Obama administration has Failed to address. Is Obama on the golf course again?
You think Hillary is going to solve these issues ? I think NOT!
Can you envision ‘Billy’ having free reign of the White House interns/staff again?
yobo, it’s a good poll, but that was taken last year during the August 2015 time frame.
This is from Sept. 2016:
https://www.qu.edu/news-and-events/quinnipiac-university-poll/national/release-detail?ReleaseID=2380
They are dissatisfied because of a lack of progress- which you can lay at the feet of an obstructionist congress determined to tarnish the legacy of the first black president- at the expense of the country.
Linking so many consecutive lies in a paragraph that no one takes the time or trouble to refute you? Gee- must be a Trump U grad
Klastri, regarding previous comments about raised arm rests in first class cabins, please check this story: http://www.infowars.com/busted-trump-sex-allegations-full-of-holes/
The Infowars guy – Alex Jones – is a lunatic who said that the Newtown school massacre was faked in an effort by the Obama administration to seize guns. That those murders never happened, and that the grieving parents are all actors on the government payroll. The fact that you believe a single word he says shows me how poor your judgment is. You are definitely a Trump supporter.
There is no question whatever that first class seats on aircraft that flew into NYNJ Port Authority airports had first class seats with moving armrests. None. Alex and you can lie about whatever you want – whether it’s first class seats or school murders. I couldn’t care less. Your opinions are now completely worthless.
I will never again respond to anything you write. You’re a liar.
Infowars??? Buahahahahahahah, why don’t you just say gremlins told you. You have now reached a low in both objective and intellectual thought. What a joke…….
Brah do yourself a favor and don’t post anything or cite anything from info wars. The dude who runs it is a look.
As Pres Obama has stated…the R’s have totally brought this monster on…themselves…now,. live with it !!
He is trying to plant the seed of doubt. However, his friends at FOX already has Sec. Clinton at +8. Sorry Donald, you can’t insult your way into The Oval Office.
http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2016/10/14/fox-news-poll-clinton-leads-trump-by-7-points.html
“I think (sniff!) Hillary should be drug tested (sniff!) before the next (sniff!) debate.”
I think trump should have his brain examine. Oh wait he doesn’t have one forget it.
Is there a double standard for women in politics?
Imagine if it were Hillary Clinton who had had five children by three husbands, who had said it was fine to refer to her daughter as a “piece of ass,” who participated in a radio conversation about oral sex in a hot tub, who rated men based on their body parts, who showed up in Playboy soft porn videos.
Imagine if 15 men had accused Clinton of assaulting or violating them, with more stepping forward each day.
Imagine if Clinton had held a Mr. Teen USA pageant and then marched unannounced into the changing area to ogle the young bodies as some were naked and, after doing the same thing at a Mr. USA pageant, marveled on a radio show at what she was allowed to get away with.
Imagine if in a primary election debate Clinton had boasted that there’s “no problem” with the size of her vagina.
Imagine if Clinton had less experience in government or the military than any person who has ever become president?
Imagine if she had said about a man running against her in the primaries, “Look at that face! Would anyone vote for that?”
Imagine if it were Clinton who had boasted, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody and I wouldn’t lose voters.”
Imagine if it were Clinton who had been caught on a hot mike referring in a degrading way to men’s genitals and boasting that her prominence gave her license to grab men’s crotches.
Imagine if she had bragged about her attempts to commit adultery — and later reportedly sought to have fired from his job the married man who resisted her seduction efforts.
Imagine that it were Hillary Clinton who had been accused of assault by her first spouse (later recanted) and later of assault in a lawsuit by a business partner.
Imagine if Clinton had defended herself from an accusation of molesting a young man by explaining, “He would not be my first choice, that I can tell you.”
Imagine if Clinton had body shamed Donald Trump, saying that she had observed his rear end and concluded, “I’m not impressed, believe me.”
Imagine if Hillary Clinton had first drawn national attention not with an idealistic speech at the Wellesley commencement, but by being sued for racial discrimination by President Richard Nixon’s administration.
Imagine if she had later been quoted by a member of her staff as saying “laziness is a trait in blacks” and had retweeted white supremacists, including one honoring the American Nazi Party.
Imagine if it were Clinton who had gone through six bankruptcies and compiled a long record of stiffing contractors, from plumbers to painters to lawyers.
Imagine if it were Clinton who had ordered $100,000 worth of pianos from a small music store in Freehold, N.J., and then announced months after taking delivery that she would pay only $70,000. And if the owner recalled: “Because of Clinton, my store stagnated for a couple of years. It made me feel really bad, like I’d been taken advantage of. I was embarrassed.”
Imagine if it were Hillary Clinton who had denounced international trade while manufacturing shirts in Bangladesh, neck ties in China, suits in Mexico and stemware in Slovenia.
NYT
Imagine a Greater America with Donald Trump at the helm.
Well, that’s what your are going to be doing-imagining. The election is over, look for Trump not to even break 200 in the electoral college, and lose by 10 million in the popular vote.
I agree that those are on the high side of what he’ll end up with. This nonsense talk by him of voter fraud is going to hard to square if he ends up being beaten by 10 or 11 million popular votes and 160 electoral votes.
More good news – Trump’s fiascos will almost certainly flip the Senate to Democratic control. Trump is a better gift to the Democrats that anyone could have imagined. Ryan is now scrambling to save the House.
Thanks, Trump supporters!
I like what you are doing here in reversing the roles of the two but what if Trump was accused of the things that Hillary has done, could you also have that same open mindedness.
You losing that’s why? Blah, Blah, Blah… Cry baby…
The end of the modem GOP party.
The monochromatic whiteness of the GOP, that has three consistent features during the last 25 years: its become whiter, older and less educated.
The results of a FiveThirtyEight and SurveyMonkey poll conducted in June1 found that one of the most indicative variables in determining Republican identification this year was agreement with the statement that the “number of immigrants who come to the United States each year” should “decrease.” Trump’s campaign kicked off with a speech last June that labeled Mexican immigrants as the dregs of society — “They’re bringing crime, they’re rapists,” he said — and has hammered on the immigration issue since, adding Muslims to the dragnet of groups deemed undesirable in the United States. The election has taken on a distinctly racial tinge, and in doing so, has clarified the motivations of voters somewhat.
Trump’s strategy, while winning him the GOP nomination in the short term, has likely only served to compound the long-term demographic and ideological problems the Republican Party has long known it faces. Over the past few decades, the GOP has remained largely white, less educated and older while the numbers of minorities in the country soared, college attainment rose and the millennial generation came of age politically. Alienating the country’s growing ranks of minorities is unwise on the sheer face of the numbers, and bad reputations can stick around for years; like sports teams and baldness, our political beliefs are passed down through generations and familial connections.
What’s more, the idea of an electorate motivated more by issues of cultural grievance than by the grand ideas of conservatism is a dispiriting notion to Republicans already frustrated by the party’s particular pattern of positioning itself as ever beholden to the past. To those Republicans, Reagan hagiography has stunted the GOP: “No one under the age of 51 today was old enough to vote for Reagan when he first ran for president,” the authors of the party’s 2012 election post-mortem, a reviled document in some corners of the party, wrote. “We sound increasingly out of touch.”
Political parties strive to be something greater than the human beings they’re comprised of; they enshrine values and ideologies for the ages. The practical implications of this pursuit are often discussions of tax policy or judicial stances, but these debates are driven by what a certain group believes to be the best, most virtuous way to live life on earth. “The underlying unity of Whig-Republican ideology from Whiggism to Reaganisam,” Gerring writes, “can be found in three interrelated values — prosperity, social order and patriotism.” However one chooses to classify the moral and intellectual pillars of the Republican Party, among the questions that surround Trump’s nomination are how a party under his direction — or in the wake of his failed presidential bid — might grapple with conveying Republican values in modern America, how Trumpism fits into the trajectory of the Republican Party, and perhaps the most looming, encapsulating curiosity of all: Where will his rise take it?
GOP2-final-WhiteTea
Somewhere in recent years, the GOP’s engagement with modern America and how to best project those values into a nation of 320 million people became dysfunctional. As the country has diversified, the party has remained monochromatic, has grayed, and rather than allowing some birch-like give on shifting cultural norms, has become an unbending oak of ideological purity. The GOP now finds itself lacking an intimate’s ability to criticize productively, given its demographic and cultural divergence from the majority of the country.
Most prominently, as has been said time and again, it is a party of breathtaking whiteness.
“You’re not going to do better than 59 percent,” Stuart Stevens, Mitt Romney’s chief strategist, told me not long ago, citing the percent of the white vote that his candidate got in 2012 while winning 24 states. Ronald Reagan, by comparison, got only 56 percent of the white vote in 1980 but won in a 44-state landslide.
“Now, you can talk about these Reagan Republicans” — at his own mention of a conservative subset of voters some say didn’t turn out for Romney, Stevens stopped to guffaw a little — “I can tell you where to find Reagan Republicans: Go to a cemetery in Oakland County, Michigan. That’s where you find ’em.”
According to the American National Election Studies, the white percentage of the national vote overall has dropped fairly steadily from around 95 percent during the period from 1948 to 1960 to the low 80s by 1992 to 73 percent in 2012. The Republican Party did not keep pace with this change, nor did it do much to win younger voters. 2008 featured a gaping chasm between the over-65 vote and the 18- to 29-year-old vote: There was a 43-point difference between how the two groups voted, with the older crowd going for John McCain by 10 percentage points, even as he lost the overall election by a 7-point margin to Barack Obama, the country’s first black president. 538
It’s over, and it’s going to be over for the next 40 years, until they can actually increase not just the size of their tent, but actually make it more attractive to all of the following: voters under 35, college educated folks, women and people of color. The GOP is broken and antiquated and they have only themselves to blame……..
Agree with the last paragraph. But if anyone doesn’t think the media is totally behind Hillary, you must be smoking something. The media has special privileges in our democracy.
The media should not be working hand in hand with Hilary’s campaign. That’s not our system of government.
Working hand in hand? All of them, including FoxNews, that reported Mr. Trump’s poll numbers are collapsing?
Any luck finding that quote you lied about? You know … the one about Mrs. Clinton saying that Republicans are more dangerous than ISIS.
No? Shocking!
I don’t think the media is necessarily behind clinton. I think it’s more a matter of them being against trump, because they know what a disaster it would be if he got into the white house.
That last paragraph was written by me. To your point, from a media basis, I have to say some of his most robust critics are from conservative sites like the National Review, American Spectator, WSJ, etc….in fact, over half my posts include cites to these sites.
He just makes things up and then goes silent when called out on his lies. Good luck getting a sensible response. Up is down and night is day. All lies.
Ike, can you summarize your post in less than 10,000 words. I have a 1/2 semester of community college under my belt but I still can’t make heads or tails out of your screed, as usual.
Then you got no business being here, this is adult stuff….
Illustrative of his point
somebody other than clinton would have been prosecuted or as a minimum lost their security clearance for doing what she did. bill met with the AG after holding up the flight for 30 minutes and not surprisingly less than a week later she is off the hook for what others have lost their careers over.
trump may be closer to the truth than he thinks. something is clearly going on behind the scenes. i don’t agree with everything trump does or says but clinton is a disgrace to our candidate process. her internal emails however they have become public, is proof of that. look what she did to bernie in her own party. he was party lapdog by not standing against how he was treated.
I also think that Trump might be on to something but he makes it hard for people to listen to him with the way he is acting. People want to believe that they are good people and don’t want to be associated with his actions, so they might miss his words.
“Trump challenges legitimacy of election”
As inevitable as death and taxes. Well, perhaps not the tax part…
As time marches on, this guy is obviously more and more of a lunatic! He has done such a disservice to America….it will take YEARS to try to unwind the damage that he has done.
So, just when you think Trump landed in the Dead Sea, the lowest part on earth, he digs even further. Late last night he started a string of tweets, basically asking to take Alec Baldwin and his hilarious satire of him on SNL, to be removed with SNL off TV.
Really?? Now, is your skin is so uber thin, that even sardonic skits on TV can be threatened. The rather clear and bitter irony is never has there been a single individual so ingratiated and benefiting from the system and society. Consider the following:
Born with a silver spoon and large inheritance in his mouth;
Father purchased his way into Penn (not the Wharton School, as he never received a degree from Wharton), as shortly after his transfer admission, there was a large donation by his father to the school;
Borrows constantly from his father and siblings, even after receiving a a large inheritance;
Multiple dubious draft deferments;
Almost every one of his domestic housing projects included very large federal subsidizes;
Extensive and almost chronic usage of federal bankruptcy laws and protection;
Monopolizing the court system to bully smaller individuals and entities;
Utilizing and taking advantage of non-profit organizations law to pay private lawsuits and legal actions;
Manipulating the tax code to basically not pay federal taxes for almost two decades; and
Over 30 years of media coverage to promote his own business interest and personally ingratiate himself and family.
It’s more than funny now, when he says the media is against him, as they were a powerful ally for over 30 years. Now, with the plethora of lurid and sordid instances being uncovered, which appear to be a part of his pathology, the media is bad???? Please, you’re a piece of tu$d and everyone now knows it……