For days, Donald Trump has been complaining that the Commission on Presidential Debates deliberately scheduled debates to coincide with NFL games in order to help Hillary Clinton. Today in Ohio, Trump said that the general election may already be “rigged,” saying that he “hears” that the election might be stolen, before meandering into a tangent and never finishing his sentence:
Trump has justified his criticism of the debate schedule by citing a letter he received from the NFL, even though the NFL says it never sent a letter to Trump, and by ignoring the fact that the Commission on Presidential Debates is a bipartisan group that came up with the dates back in September. In 2012, the debates also overlapped with NFL games.
The theme that the general election will be rigged has been paraded by Trump confidant Roger Stone, who told conspiracy theorist Alex Jones yesterday that Clinton might “steal this election” using the Supreme Court “now that Scalia has been taken care of,” a reference to conspiracy theories about Justice Antonin Scalia’s death, which Trump has also embraced.
Stone suggested that polls are skewing the results to show Clinton ahead of Trump so no one realizes it when she steals the election.
He said that if the election results don’t reflect the findings of Trump’s “private polls,” the GOP nominee should challenge the election and have his people “march on Washington” and tell Clinton that he will “block your inauguration.”
Stone similarly told Milo Yiannopoulous of Breitbart that if there is an “illegitimate” election, then there will be “widespread civil disobedience” and “it will be a bloodbath.”
“I think we have widespread voter fraud, but the first thing that Trump needs to do is begin talking about it constantly,” Stone said. “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. 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.’”
“If you can’t have an honest election, nothing else counts,” he continued. “I think he’s gotta put them on notice that their inauguration will be a rhetorical, and when I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath. The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in. No, we will not stand for it. We will not stand for it.”
“So, I mean the dream here, the ultimate ideal is that he wins by such a significant margin nationally that this is unnecessary,” Yiannopoulos concluded. “But it’s interesting to hear you say this, and it’s funny also, because Trump will go there. He will go to the places other politicians wont, and he’s probably the only person to run for president within the last fifty years who would dare to do this, and might even get away with it. It’s remarkable isn’t it how he’s just sort of re-injected reality into politics”.
