Donald Trump Is Setting a Time Bomb
His calls for racial voter intimidation on Election Day could explode in all our faces.
By Jamelle Bouie
Donald Trump spins so many tales—and goes after so many different groups and individuals—that it’s sometimes easy to miss his most invidious rhetoric. For months, the Republican presidential nominee has undermined confidence in our electoral system, warning his supporters that this election will be “rigged” and stolen through “voter fraud.”
Trump first told his supporters of this conspiracy theory at an Ohio rally in August and followed up the claim in an interview with Sean Hannity: “I’m telling you, Nov. 8, 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.” This was in line with comments from his surrogates, like longtime adviser Roger Stone, who told Breitbart that Trump would begin to talk “constantly” about voter fraud. “He needs to say for example, today would be a perfect example: ‘I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud.’ ” Stone continued: “‘If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.’” The implication is clear: If Trump loses, he should foment this “civil disobedience.” And he should start preparing his supporters for it now. He seems to be doing just that.
“The only way we can lose, in my opinion … is if cheating goes on,” said Trump during another August rally in Pennsylvania. In Wilmington, North Carolina—where more than a century earlier, white terrorists toppled a black-led city government in a violent insurrection—Trump warned his supporters that without strict voter identification laws, people would be “voting 15 times for Hillary.”
These are rhetorical time bombs, statements that cast doubt on our democracy, planted with growing frequency as Trump tries to rationalize the fact that he’s losing. There’s a chance this is harmless, that Trump will resign himself to defeat if he loses to Hillary Clinton and bring his supporters with him—during the first presidential debate moderator Lester Holt asked him whether he would “accept the outcome [of the election] as the will of the voters,” and he said unequivocally “the answer is that if she wins I will absolutely support her.” But that was before he lashed out against the media for his poor performance, before the polls began to tilt back in Clinton’s favor. Now that he’s behind, Trump has returned to questioning the legitimacy of the election. More critically, the idea that he would respect the results of the election, full stop, ignores the hatred that’s come to characterize Trump’s campaign, the violence he’s condoned against protesters and other vocal opponents, the virulent prejudice he’s brought to mainstream politics, and the apocalypticism of his message, where he stands as the final hope for an embattled minority of resentful whites. These rhetorical time bombs, in other words, could be the catalyst for actual intimidation and violence, before and after Election Day. And if that violence and intimidation strikes, it will be against the chief targets of Trump’s campaign: people of color.
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http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/2016/10/donald_trump_is_setting_a_time_bomb_for_racial_violence_on_election_day.html
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Democrats: All your base are belong to us.
You have no chance to survive make your time.
Trump: Take off every ZIG
