Donald Trump has continued an unprecedented effort by a major presidential candidate to effectively declare the presidential election invalid before voters have even had their say.
On Monday, just over three weeks before election day, the Republican nominee repeated his unsupported claim that voter fraud was rampant and specifically stated in a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin that ballots cast by undocumented immigrants led to Barack Obama’s victory in North Carolina in 2008. “People who died 10 years ago are still voting,” he claimed.
Trump’s Wisconsin appearance came after a series of provocative tweets culminating on Monday morning when he wrote: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!” Never before has a major presidential candidate in effect rejected the results before the election has been held.
In remarks that were mostly scripted Trump spoke darkly about the election he has long described as “rigged” and made specific unfounded claims about in-person voter fraud.
Throughout October, Mr. Trump has claimed, without evidence, that the vote will be “rigged” and “taken away from us.” At the final presidential debate, he refused to say he would accept the election’s outcome, and later joked at a rally that he would accept the results “if I win.”
In weak democracies around the world, scholars warned Friday, political leaders have used the same language to erode popular faith in democracy often intending to incite violence that will serve their political aims, and sometimes to undo democracy entirely.
The United States is not at risk of such worst-case scenarios. American democratic norms and institutions are too strong for any one politician to destabilize. But Mr. Trump’s language, the scholars say, follows a similar playbook and could pose real, if less extreme, risks.
“Almost always, public faith, public trust in institutions is eroded when this happens,” Mr. Levitsky said of politicians who accuse their opponents of stealing an election and refuse to concede.
Asked whether his study of democratic decline abroad led him to worry about low-level violence in the United States should Mr. Trump lose and refuse to concede, he responded, I think we should be very worried.
Trump has insisted that the allegations are “false stuff”, suggested the women were motivated by financial gain and that some of them were not attractive enough for him to grope anyway. On Friday he portrayed the New York Times’ reporting on the subject as part of a Mexican conspiracy to defeat him.
On Monday Trump described the press at the Wisconsin rally as “the enemies back there” and repeatedly accused the media of “poisoning the minds of voters … the media is an extension of the Clinton campaign”.
As the crowd chanted “CNN sucks,” Trump answered: “They really do.”
He continued to conjure imagery of shadowy backers behind Hillary Clinton: “Her international donors control every move she made … history will record that 2017 is the year America lost its independence.”
In one display of policy substance, Trump proposed ethics reforms including a five-year ban on executive branch officials lobbying the government after leaving public service, and a similar ban for staffers on Capitol Hill.
Trump also showed some restraint towards at least one of his Republican critics. After attacking Paul Ryan repeatedly on Twitter on Sunday, describing him as “a man who doesn’t know how to win”, the candidate refrained in the speaker’s home state.
The two have had a notably frosty relationship, although Ryan insists he will vote for Trump in November. Still, Trump’s Wisconsin crowd chanted Paul Ryan sucks.
Because this strategy requires supporters to believe that the election was brazenly stolen, leaders will often spend weeks declaring the vote fraudulent before it is even held — as Mr. Trump has done.
“Merely talking about not accepting results sets off a chain of events that weakens the structure of democratic continuity,” Matt Glassman, a political scientist, wrote in a series of Twitter messages this past week.
Contesting a presidential election, he said, risks turning bedrock democratic assumptions — rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, the sanctity of elections — into points of political dispute.
But not all leaders execute this playbook consciously or with an eye toward some specific prize, said Nic Cheeseman, a political scientist at the University of Oxford who studies sub-Saharan Africa.
Mr. Trump might be less Hugo Chávez than Julius Malema, he said, referring to a South African populist who challenged the legitimacy of elections this spring to save face after his party lost.
South African analysts have warned that Mr. Malema, whatever his intent, eroded popular faith in their country’s democratic processes. Disturbing political violence followed in the weeks after, with riots in Pretoria and two members of Mr. Malema’s party killed in Johannesburg.
Three factors shape whether accusations of election-rigging lead to violence, Mr. Cheeseman said: whether people consider political violence socially acceptable, the winning’s side willingness to appease the loser with concessions and “whether people genuinely, deep down, believe the election was rigged.”
The first of those three conditions is not present in the United States, which lacks the prevalent militia violence of weaker states, making large-scale violence extremely unlikely.
But the second works both for and against the United States: While Mr. Trump’s supporters do not have to fear political oppression if he loses, they cannot expect that he will be granted the vice presidency if they protest, which happened after Zimbabwe’s elections in 2008. The third is unknowable. If those conditions are taken together, Mr. Cheeseman said, the outlook is not one of doom, but it is worrisome.
Ryan had implicitly rebuked Trump’s claims of a rigged election on Saturday when AshLee Strong, his spokesperson, said in a statement: “Our democracy relies on confidence in election results and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity.”
The Republican nominee’s wife, Melania, made her first public appearance since her plagiarized speech at the RNC in July. She spoke to Anderson Cooper to defend her husband in the aftermath of the leaked tape and the barrage of allegations of sexual misconduct.
Melania Trump insisted that Access Hollywood host Billy Bush had “egged on” her husband to make inappropriate remarks and blamed a media conspiracy for their release. “It was the media, it was NBC, it was Access Hollywood, it was the left-leaning media,” she told CNN.
With the third presidential debate looming, Hillary Clinton didn’t hold any rallies but Bill and Chelsea Clinton did appear at a celebrity-studded concert to raise campaign funds in midtown Manhattan on Monday night.
On Monday, just over three weeks before election day, the Republican nominee repeated his unsupported claim that voter fraud was rampant and specifically stated in a rally in Green Bay, Wisconsin that ballots cast by undocumented immigrants led to Barack Obama’s victory in North Carolina in 2008. “People who died 10 years ago are still voting,” he claimed.
Trump’s Wisconsin appearance came after a series of provocative tweets culminating on Monday morning when he wrote: “Of course there is large scale voter fraud happening on and before election day. Why do Republican leaders deny what is going on? So naive!” Never before has a major presidential candidate in effect rejected the results before the election has been held.
In remarks that were mostly scripted Trump spoke darkly about the election he has long described as “rigged” and made specific unfounded claims about in-person voter fraud.
Throughout October, Mr. Trump has claimed, without evidence, that the vote will be “rigged” and “taken away from us.” At the final presidential debate, he refused to say he would accept the election’s outcome, and later joked at a rally that he would accept the results “if I win.”
In weak democracies around the world, scholars warned Friday, political leaders have used the same language to erode popular faith in democracy often intending to incite violence that will serve their political aims, and sometimes to undo democracy entirely.
The United States is not at risk of such worst-case scenarios. American democratic norms and institutions are too strong for any one politician to destabilize. But Mr. Trump’s language, the scholars say, follows a similar playbook and could pose real, if less extreme, risks.
“Almost always, public faith, public trust in institutions is eroded when this happens,” Mr. Levitsky said of politicians who accuse their opponents of stealing an election and refuse to concede.
Asked whether his study of democratic decline abroad led him to worry about low-level violence in the United States should Mr. Trump lose and refuse to concede, he responded, I think we should be very worried.
Trump has insisted that the allegations are “false stuff”, suggested the women were motivated by financial gain and that some of them were not attractive enough for him to grope anyway. On Friday he portrayed the New York Times’ reporting on the subject as part of a Mexican conspiracy to defeat him.
On Monday Trump described the press at the Wisconsin rally as “the enemies back there” and repeatedly accused the media of “poisoning the minds of voters … the media is an extension of the Clinton campaign”.
As the crowd chanted “CNN sucks,” Trump answered: “They really do.”
He continued to conjure imagery of shadowy backers behind Hillary Clinton: “Her international donors control every move she made … history will record that 2017 is the year America lost its independence.”
In one display of policy substance, Trump proposed ethics reforms including a five-year ban on executive branch officials lobbying the government after leaving public service, and a similar ban for staffers on Capitol Hill.
Trump also showed some restraint towards at least one of his Republican critics. After attacking Paul Ryan repeatedly on Twitter on Sunday, describing him as “a man who doesn’t know how to win”, the candidate refrained in the speaker’s home state.
The two have had a notably frosty relationship, although Ryan insists he will vote for Trump in November. Still, Trump’s Wisconsin crowd chanted Paul Ryan sucks.
Because this strategy requires supporters to believe that the election was brazenly stolen, leaders will often spend weeks declaring the vote fraudulent before it is even held — as Mr. Trump has done.
“Merely talking about not accepting results sets off a chain of events that weakens the structure of democratic continuity,” Matt Glassman, a political scientist, wrote in a series of Twitter messages this past week.
Contesting a presidential election, he said, risks turning bedrock democratic assumptions — rule of law, the peaceful transfer of power, the sanctity of elections — into points of political dispute.
But not all leaders execute this playbook consciously or with an eye toward some specific prize, said Nic Cheeseman, a political scientist at the University of Oxford who studies sub-Saharan Africa.
Mr. Trump might be less Hugo Chávez than Julius Malema, he said, referring to a South African populist who challenged the legitimacy of elections this spring to save face after his party lost.
South African analysts have warned that Mr. Malema, whatever his intent, eroded popular faith in their country’s democratic processes. Disturbing political violence followed in the weeks after, with riots in Pretoria and two members of Mr. Malema’s party killed in Johannesburg.
Three factors shape whether accusations of election-rigging lead to violence, Mr. Cheeseman said: whether people consider political violence socially acceptable, the winning’s side willingness to appease the loser with concessions and “whether people genuinely, deep down, believe the election was rigged.”
The first of those three conditions is not present in the United States, which lacks the prevalent militia violence of weaker states, making large-scale violence extremely unlikely.
But the second works both for and against the United States: While Mr. Trump’s supporters do not have to fear political oppression if he loses, they cannot expect that he will be granted the vice presidency if they protest, which happened after Zimbabwe’s elections in 2008. The third is unknowable. If those conditions are taken together, Mr. Cheeseman said, the outlook is not one of doom, but it is worrisome.
Ryan had implicitly rebuked Trump’s claims of a rigged election on Saturday when AshLee Strong, his spokesperson, said in a statement: “Our democracy relies on confidence in election results and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity.”
The Republican nominee’s wife, Melania, made her first public appearance since her plagiarized speech at the RNC in July. She spoke to Anderson Cooper to defend her husband in the aftermath of the leaked tape and the barrage of allegations of sexual misconduct.
Melania Trump insisted that Access Hollywood host Billy Bush had “egged on” her husband to make inappropriate remarks and blamed a media conspiracy for their release. “It was the media, it was NBC, it was Access Hollywood, it was the left-leaning media,” she told CNN.
With the third presidential debate looming, Hillary Clinton didn’t hold any rallies but Bill and Chelsea Clinton did appear at a celebrity-studded concert to raise campaign funds in midtown Manhattan on Monday night.
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