Trump’s approval rating has not increased in the polls, with the national average remaining roughly the same as it was at the end of April, which is unsurprising given his tendency to exaggerate his own popularity.
On the flip side, it’s no wonder he insists that his failures are the result of things being rigged against him. That’s in part because “I failed because it was rigged” has always been more appealing to him than “I failed because of Trump.” And he always says everything was rigged, with such frequency that even a parrot would be a little embarrassed by the repetition.
The most common, of course, is the claim that the 2020 presidential election was rigged against him. He often uses the word interchangeably with “stolen,” referring to a vague sense that illegal votes were cast, or that the system was conspired to frame him, or both, or something else entirely. The “rigged” language has been pushed hard by Trump’s allies who are reluctant to jump on his baseless claims of voter fraud, but to Trump it’s all the same thing: a way to trivialize as unfair something that he didn’t want to happen.
Going back to the past, Trump also recently declared that the government’s jobs numbers were “rigged” — an echo of rhetoric deployed before the 2012 election to downplay economic growth under Barack Obama. The numbers, incidentally, were not rigged.
In March, Trump declared the polls were rigged, but he seemed quick to realize that this was hard to square with his claim that all the polls showed him winning. (“The polls are all rigged,” Trump said at a rally. “Of course, they’re rigged these days because I’m winning by a landslide. I say that all the time. Ignore that statement.”) But old habits die hard, and Trump spent much of the 2016 and 2020 elections ignoring as unreliable polls that showed him losing to Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden. (Trump lost the popular vote to both Clinton and Biden.)
In February, President Trump spoke at a rally, blasting former Wyoming Rep. Liz Cheney and the House Select Committee she co-chairs, which he said was tasked with investigating the January 6, 2021, Capitol riots and which he viewed as a “rigged deal.”
And the month before, Trump made even more extensive remarks in a speech, mentioning things (mainly the election) being rigged 10 times.
“The whole system is rigged,” he claimed, going on to talk about how he’d been indicted more times than notorious gangster Al Capone.
All of this this yearAnd that excludes a bunch of other examples, like him saying, “This election is rigged,” or polls showing Republican presidential candidate Nikki Haley doing well in the primaries, or the indictments he’s facing outside of New York. Everything bad he’s had recently is rigged.
After leaving office, he was pretty quiet for a while, mostly through no volition, but during the 2022 election cycle, he attended several political rallies and denounced various irregularities, including Alaska’s ranked choice voting favoring his critic Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-N.Y.) and the media (which he claimed was rigged here, just like Russia).
Of course, his presidency was not quiet either. The period between the election and Biden’s inauguration was filled with complaints of election fraud, centered around his loss and the Senate runoff elections in Georgia that Democrats won the day before the January 6 attack on the Capitol.
but, 2020 ElectionsThe rigging was much more varied. News articles on social media sites were rigged, search results were rigged. Environmental laws were rigged to favor countries other than the United States. The hearings that led to the first impeachment were rigged. NBC town hall meetings were rigged, and once again the entire system was rigged.
one largely What was rigged, according to Trump, was the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election, which was rigged because Trump was investigated despite Hillary Clinton being “exonerated”. — despite lengthy congressional and criminal investigations. (In other instances, he has denied any allegations against her.) The fact that the media coverage of the investigation won a Pulitzer Prize was one example of how the system was rigged against him. The entire case was a “false and false witch hunt.”
“I say a lot of things are rigged in this country,” Trump said bluntly in October 2018, “and we’re fixing it. But it was a rigged system. A lot of things were rigged.” Trump was talking not about himself, but about prescription drug prices.
During the 2016 campaign, Trump sought to provoke Clinton by frequently alleging that the process by which she won the Democratic nomination was rigged, relying in part on information released by WikiLeaks linked to Russian interference efforts.
In the third presidential debate that year, Clinton observed a pattern here that Trump had already established.
“Whenever Donald feels that things aren’t going his way, he claims that whatever it is is rigged against him,” she said, giving several examples, including “when his TV show didn’t win an Emmy three years in a row, he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged against him.”
That’s pretty much true, but he doesn’t explicitly use the word “fraud.”
According to many people, and even if I had been nominated, I would have won the Emmy Award multiple times if it weren’t for my political stance. @Primetime Emmy Awards
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 14, 2013
Before Clinton became the opponent, another Republican was the opponent, meaning the fraud was committed by his party. Party Leader.
It was during this period that Trump’s affinity for the phrase was born — or, as Trump puts it, the phrase itself.
“I think the system is rigged,” he told The Washington Post in an interview. “I invented the words, and now people are using them. They’ve adopted a lot of my great words. I’d never heard of the system being rigged before I started.”
(You may have done this once or twice.)
But this has been the crux of Trump’s argument for a decade: that the system is rigged, rigged against him and against his supporters. In fact, the system is rigged so much that it allowed Clinton to continue running for president in 2016.
“The system is rigged and she should not be allowed to run,” Trump said just before that year’s election. “Hillary is involved in a massive criminal enterprise and cover-up. … She will face a lengthy investigation and ultimately a criminal trial, our president.”
If you can imagine such a thing.
