For two weeks now Donald Trump has been whining that he is the victim of sinister, shadowy forces colluding to deny him the Republican presidential nomination. This miniature campaign began with an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal in which Trump complained about the Colorado convention, calling it “a rigged delegate-selection process." A few days later he complained at a rally that the Republican primaries were "a rigged, crooked system that's designed so that the party bosses can pick whoever they want" and that it's all filled with "so much phony stuff."

As a factual matter, none of these charges is true. The Republican primaries, caucuses, and state conventions are perfectly reasonable. You may not like the system. But it is not rigged, nor crooked, nor phony. The rules are pre-determined and designed to reach an outcome in a particular manner, one that values not just popularity but the ability to rally members of the party. The system is orderly and transparent.

Trump no doubt objects to it precisely because the system isn't rigged, while he himself has spent an entire lifetime exploiting, distorting, and manipulating systems of rules and codes of conduct.

Let's begin with his bankruptcies. Trump has filed for corporate bankruptcy four times, in 1991, 1992, 2004, and 2009. In a piece revealing how Trump's companies always seem to go broke while Trump the man seems to stay rich, Forbes magazine explained that following his first bankruptcy, where Trump personally lost $900 million, Trump quit backstopping his corporate debts with personal guarantees. His companies might engage in financially risky behavior, but Trump, personally, would never again suffer any consequences. Anyone to whom Trump owed money would get pennies on the dollar, but Trump himself never again lost a single one of his gold-plated toilets.

Needless to say, this is not the experience of most business owners in America. If you own a sandwich shop, or a law practice, your personal wealth is tied closely to the health of your business. You are probably incorporated, so that if your company fails your personal assets are protected—but you do not have access to large pools of capital without providing some security. If your business has to file for bankruptcy once, getting capital again will be difficult. Go bankrupt twice and it will be that much harder, if not impossible, to find vendors and banks willing to do business with you.

The number of business owners in America who could go bankrupt four times and somehow still find banks and vendors willing to work with them is vanishingly small. A man who could accomplish this feat is rigging the system, which Trump forthrightly admitted to Forbes in 2011, saying, "Basically I've used the laws of the country to my advantage."

Next, let's look at Trump's political dealings. Trump has a long history of giving money to Democratic politicians. He has given money not just to Hillary Clinton and other local Democratic pols in New York, who are his friends and neighbors, but to Democrats across the country, including Harry Reid, Terry McAuliffe, Ted Kennedy, Tom Daschle, and Rahm Emanuel.

Early in the primaries Trump was attacked for these donations, with his rivals suggesting that they prove Trump is neither a conservative nor a Republican. Trump's defense was that these donations had nothing to do with his political beliefs—he was merely greasing the skids for his business dealings. In 2011, Trump adviser Michael Cohen explained the donations to CNN: "It's irrelevant as to whether or not it's Republican or Democrat. . . . There are many business deals he does that that requires."

Trump himself said that same thing to Jake Tapper last June: "I give money to everybody. . . . For instance, I've helped Nancy Pelosi, I've helped [Harry] Reid. . . . I was in business. I built a great company. They always treated me nicely."

Solyndra was treated "nicely" by Washington, too. Again: Trump's political experience is—by his own admission—one in which he rigged the system by purchasing political influence in order to gain advantage for his business dealings.

Is this sort of thing illegal? Not exactly. But it means Trump himself is one of the people responsible for turning our politics into a crooked enterprise.

Finally, there are Trump's personal promises, notably his wedding vows. Not everyone believes in the "till death do us part" clause. C'est la vie. But Trump's serial violation of those vows—he is on his third marriage, so far—should make his supporters a bit nervous about how he'll honor his campaign promises.

Trump has always been adamant that it's important to rig the rules of divorce, just in case. In his 2007 book Think Big and Kick Ass in Business and Life, Trump wrote that "it is idiotic to get married without a prenuptial agreement." Because without one, the divorce laws might require greater compensation for your ex-wife. People in love with Trump because he's an anti-p.c. iconoclast who's going to crush the corrupt political system and build a wall on the border with Mexico ought to understand that, in this relationship, they're Marla Maples.

All of that said, what Trump does in his marriages is his business. What's telling is what Trump has done in other people's marriages. Again, here's Trump in his own words, from Think Big and Kick Ass:

The women I have dated over the years could have any man they want; they are the top models and most beautiful women in the world. I have been able to date (screw) them all because I have something that many men do not have. . . . Beautiful, famous, successful, married—I've had them all, secretly, the world's biggest names, but unlike Geraldo [Rivera] I don't talk about it.

This wasn't a onetime boast. In his 1997 Trump: The Art of the Comeback Trump wrote, "If I told the real stories of my experiences with women, often seemingly very happily married and important women, this book would be a guaranteed best-seller."

All of this underscores why Trump's complaints about the Republican primary system are not just wrong, as a factual matter, but monumentally hypocritical.

What's interesting is that, hypocrisy aside, Trump's petulant, put-upon routine seems to have worked. Trump has used voters' decency against them, by appealing to their innate sense of fairness. But they should understand that Trump's claim is completely without merit.

It's just another Trump con job. And it ought to be rejected as such.