OCTOBER 18, 2016
Photo: Getty
On Tuesday in the White House Rose Garden, President Obama fulfilled the dream wish of any responsible voter — he told Donald Trump to “stop whining” about the election.
With Italian Prime Minister Matteo Renzi standing by his side, the President was asked about Trump’s charge that the election in three weeks’ time will be “rigged” against him and offered a textbook lesson on Presidential smackdowns.
“There is no serious person out there who would suggest somehow that you could even rig America’s elections, in part because they’re so decentralized and the numbers of votes involved—there’s no evidence that has happened in the past or that there are instances that that will happen this time.”
“And so, I’d advise Mr. Trump to stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes.”
Boom! If that wasn’t enough, he threw in this extra left hook:
“I have never seen in my lifetime or in modern political history any presidential candidate trying to discredit the elections and the election process before votes have even taken place.”
“If you start whining before the game’s even over, if whenever things are going badly for you and you lose, you start blaming somebody else, then you don’t have what it takes to be in this job.”
Wow. Note the President’s arguments. He persuasively explained the case as to why actual voter fraud is nearly unheard of — elections experts have conducted studies about whether voter fraud is real and found that there have been only 31 instances of in-person voter fraud out of over 1 billion votes ever cast in American elections. It’s often said that you have a better chance of being hit by lightning than ever witnessing a case of voter fraud at the polls.
Of course, the Republican Party has been trotting this voter fraud lie for years as justification for enacting harsh voter ID laws, designed to intimidate voters (particularly minority voters, who largely vote Democratic), thereby giving Republican candidates a leg up by limiting the available voter pool.
Trump, however, is using the voter fraud trope for a completely different reason. If he is as avid a cable news watcher as he is rumored to be, he must know by now that, if his polling numbers stay just where they are for the next three weeks, he is going to lose on November 8. So there’s got to be someone or something on which he can pin the blame. This has been a constant throughout this campaign and, I would argue, throughout his career.
So he’s setting the stage for his Election Night argument — “I didn’t lose this election, It was taken away from me by Them” — and his angry followers will be only too happy to in the blank as who Them are. The post-election days are going to get ugly, but his “it was rigged” excuse will give Trump the necessary illusion that he’s not a loser.
For Trump to gain any ground over the next few weeks, he has to stop getting off-message and taking the bait every time someone says something critical.
That’s what made the President’s remarks on Tuesday so effective. Trump’s ego is totally tied up with his need to display strength at all times in a hypermasculine Putin-esque way.
But by calling Trump a whiner, Obama took a deep dig at Trump in this place where he’s most vulnerable, reducing all of his bluster to the cries of a petulant infant. That has got to get under Trump’s skin, and it was Obama’s sweet revenge against the Birther-In-Chief.
Just a thing of beauty to watch.
