Trump Says, 'The Election Is Rigged.' He's Right!

For once, Donald Trump has spoken the truth. He says the election is rigged, and he's 100% correct.

It's rigged for the Republican Party.

In hundreds of congressional districts all over the nation, the election is rigged through gerrymandering - which is vote theft done by drawing the districts in a way which carefully carves up liberal districts into little pieces while watering down their vote with conservative suburbs. Take for example Austin, Texas, one of the most liberal cities in the U.S. You would think this city would get at least one Democrat to represent them. Instead, they get six republicans. The district map looks like a wagon wheel with Austin at its hub, as Republican state legislators sought to dilute the liberal impact of Austin. Or sometimes, the district maps are drawn in such a way as to sequester all the liberal vote into one area, leaving other districts completely to the Republicans. Take for example Milwaukee, WI. That city used to be represented by two Democrats, one on the north side and one on the south side. Now, only one Democrat represents Milwaukee's central city, while Republicans gave themselves an entire additional seat in congress, bolstered by hyper-conservative Waukesha, and therefore unassailable by the moderate majority.

The system is rigged through voter ID laws, which are a deliberate means of making minority voters jump through extra hoops in order to have their vote cast. Apparently Republicans are more concerned with the rare occurrence of someone voting for a dead person or voting twice than they are about something like gerrymandering - which steals millions of votes at a single stroke. Rigging the system is apparently all right - if it's for the conservative side.

The system is rigged because the removal of the fairness doctrine in 1988 by Ronald Reagan and the deregulation of the airwaves by Bill Clinton in 1996 has destroyed the balance and objectivity of the media. Now, nearly all the A.M. airwaves are owned by Newscorp. All the AM, FM, television and cable network stations are owned by three behemoths: Newscorp again, Spectrum (Time Warner) and Comcast. These Sauropods regularly stomp on freedom of the press, dominating everything that gets prioritized. And so when A.M. flagship stations, like WTMJ in Milwaukee, are not covering a major sporting event or weather emergency, they are belching non-stop right-wing propaganda designed to foster hatred at the liberal left. Fox News then exacerbates the problem by providing a news outlet which tells conservatives only the news they want to hear - and they inevitably want to hear stuff that makes them even angrier. MSNBC provides a similar outlet for those on the left, and CNN sensationalizes whatever is left in the middle.

Somewhere along the way, these three major media providers realized that the more they divided America, and the more gasoline they threw on the political fire, the more money they could haul in every two to four years. Because all that campaigning money doesn't go down a deep, dark hole. It goes into advertising! Which goes into the pockets of Newscorp. Spectrum, and Comcast! Each election, it gets worse, and more money is purportedly needed to stop the extremism of the other side. More money, to feed the ever-hungry monster of political advertising, for which the networks charge over-inflated rates.

And this downward spiral has been going on for over two decades, now. Nearly thirty if one includes the period from 88 to 96 when the conservative media moguls didn't yet fully realize the power Reagan had handed them through executive order, no input from Congress. This is why the cult of liberal-bashing has led to the cult-of-personality known as Trumpism.

The system has literally rigged some people's brains. Which is why Trump isn't losing in every state, which is the way it would be if the media were capable of doing its job.

The system was rigged to make Trump the Republican candidate in the first place. Because Trump, for all his faults, is exactly what he boasted himself to be back in 2015: a "ratings machine." So the news media accidentally promoted Trump, reporting about him at every turn as though the Republican primary were the new TV reality show. With only few brave exceptions such as Megyn Kelly, they went soft on covering Trump. Then, after nearly a year and a half of handling the man with kid gloves, the news media had a crisis of conscience and began covering him like the human train wreck he really was. A "Trumpster fire," if you will.

I don't blame Donald for griping about how the media is against him now, and claiming that the media is now part of a "rigged system" against him. He has a legitimate point at least in the sense that the media has changed the rules towards the end of the game. But the system was rigged in his favor before, and the reality is that he's complaining now because it's finally being fair. How dare the media report the truth about him!

Finally, the system was rigged to ensure that the Republican base would elect a primary candidate that would not be moderate. It was rigged with "winner take all" states that gave more delegates to someone who did not win that high a percentage of the vote. So, for example, Trump won only 32.5% of South Carolina's vote, yet got all 50 delegates. He won 32.7% of the vote in Vermont, and got all the delegates. He won 45.7% of the vote in Florida, yet received all 99 of its delegates. Does this sound fair to you? Of course it doesn't! It doesn't because that's what we call a rigged system! It was rigged in favor of demagogues like Donald Trump!

Now he's upset because the general election isn't tilted in his favor in the same way. So the system must be "rigged." Boo fucking hoo, poor baby.

Up to now, at every turn, any rigging of the system has been in favor of the Republicans and/or Donald Trump. And yet, in spite of all this cheating, in spite of all the vote-stealing through gerrymandering, in spite of all the roadblocks put in place to hamper minorities from voting through voter ID laws...

Trump is STILL losing!

How incompetent do you have to be to be on the brink of losing even the gerrymandered congressional districts, and then somehow complain that the system is rigged against you?!

The answer is, too incompetent to work as a greeter at WalMart, much less be president.


Eric

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