There is broad, bipartisan consensus that Donald Trump’s sense of entitlement is in need of reform.
The Republican nominee has spent the past two weeks trying to energize his base … by informing them that their votes probably won’t matter, since a cabal of international bankers — working in coordination with Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim, a bunch of ugly, lying women, and “certain communities” in Philadelphia — will probably just rig the election, anyway.
Which is to say: The standard-bearer of the “party of personal responsibility” has spent most of this month blaming everyone but himself for his plummeting poll numbers.
Now, (virtually) everyone from Barack Obama to Bill O’Reilly thinks it’s time for Trump to end his tour of the whine country.
“You start whining before the game is even over?” Obama asked an imaginary Trump, incredulously, during a presser in the White House Rose Garden with Italian prime minister Matteo Renzi. “If, whenever things are going bad for you and you lose, you start blaming somebody else? You don’t have what it takes to do this job.”
Obama went on to note the paucity of evidence for large-scale voter fraud in the United States — and how difficult such a scheme would be to pull off, given how decentralized the American voting system is.
On Monday night, Bill O’Reilly offered a more terse version of the same message, telling Stephen Colbert, that his recommendation to Trump was, “Stop whining … Nobody cares about the ‘rigged’ stuff.”
A bevy of Republican lawmakers, including Ohio secretary of State John Husted, House speaker Paul Ryan and South Carolina senator Lindsey Graham have offered the mogul similar recommendations.
Still, the idea that a major-party candidate shouldn’t baselessly challenge the legitimacy of our democracy is far from unanimous on the right side of the aisle.
“I do believe that there are elements that will try to rig the election on varying degrees of scale,” Peter Goldberg, a member of the Republican National Committee from Alaska, told Politico. “And this will certainly affect the outcome in varying degrees.”
Lori Klein Corbin was one of many other top GOP officials to echo this sentiment.
“It is a grave concern on a number of fronts,” the Arizona RNC member told the outlet. “When you have Democrats using Obama’s federal forms to register voters who do not have to declare if they are citizens or not and often show no ID.”
Even George Will, one of America’s most prominent anti-Trump, anti-denim conservatives, defended the notion that the IRS had “rigged” every election in recent memory.
And even Republicans who believe the election will be carried out fairly, still plan to deny the legitimacy of its result.
The fact that so many members of the Grand Old Party think America’s election system is rigged against them is kind of amazing: Republican congressional candidates are on pace to collectively receive 5 percent fewer votes than their Democratic challengers this fall — and to maintain control of the House, anyway.
But, at least there is some bipartisan agreement that Donald Trump whines more than any billionaire should.
