Have you heard the one about how the election is already “rigged” against Donald Trump?

At his past three rallies, the Republican nominee has been wedging a new riff into the usual stump speech celebrations of poll numbers and ratings, laments about the country’s decline, promises of a border wall and complaints about everything from the “dishonest” media to crying babies.


It started Monday afternoon in Columbus, Ohio, where Trump held his first rally after a weekend off the campaign trail and sought to shift the focus away from four days of controversy over his response to a Gold Star family who criticized him at last week’s Democratic convention.

“I’m afraid the election is going to be rigged, I have to be honest,” Trump said at the rally. He repeated the riff Monday night at a rally in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, and again Tuesday morning onstage in Ashburn, Virginia. "We gotta beat a totally dishonest machine," he said, pointing to the lack of federal charges against Hillary Clinton after the FBI investigation into her use of a private email server as another data point buttressing his broader case. "It’s a disgrace to our country that she got away with it. It's a crooked system. We're running against a rigged system, and we're running against a dishonest media."

Asserting, specifically, that November’s election will be “rigged” is, all at once: the musing of a candidate who often gives credence to conspiracy theories; a talking point aimed at a disaffected electorate; a presidential candidate, following a dip in the polls, contemplating defeat; an effort to delegitimize the democratic process that could bring that defeat to bear; and a thinly veiled threat by a litigious billionaire to contest such an election result in court.

It’s also language he’s appropriating from one of his fiercest critics, Elizabeth Warren, the Massachusetts senator whose lashing critique of Wall Street endeared her to the Democratic base. Trump, of course, is using it to inoculate himself from the constant fact-checking and questioning of a “rigged” American media and from the possible defeat the “rigged” American democratic system could deliver — and if it appeals to the Warren- and Bernie Sanders-loving Democrats he’s been assiduously courting, all the better.

“Ever since the 2000 presidential election, a percentage of Americans have believed the system was rigged. And that percentage has grown as politicians discovered the power of that phrase and used it more and more often,” said GOP pollster Frank Luntz. “Trump is masterful at appropriating powerful language from others. He jumped on the politically correct bandwagon at the first debate, and it's one of the reasons he won the nomination. His words are the words of alienated Americans, and that's why he has done so well up to this point.”

Unlike his comments over the weekend responding to the criticism of a Gold Star family and digging himself deeper into a hole, Trump’s rhetoric about an un-level playing field, be it in American politics or life generally, is a beneficial talking point, one that has tested exceedingly well in focus groups, according to a source close to the campaign.

“The campaign believes any time Donald Trump is talking about a ‘rigged system’ is a good day for Donald Trump,” the source said. “It's a reliable message he can lean on and riff on and develop pretty safely. It resonates very well, especially with any Bernie voters who might be considering Trump.”

The notion of a rigged election beset by voter fraud isn’t just a talking point for Trump, but something he genuinely believes. So, too, does his longtime political adviser, Roger Stone, who expanded on the idea in an interview last week, even suggesting that Trump begin speaking in no uncertain terms about the possibility of fraud.

“He needs to say for example, today would be a perfect example: ‘I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud. If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government,’” Stone said in an interview with Breitbart. “I think he’s gotta put them on notice that their inauguration will be a rhetorical [bloodbath], and when I mean civil disobedience, not violence, but it will be a bloodbath. The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in. No, we will not stand for it. We will not stand for it.”

On Monday night, Trump told Fox News’ Sean Hannity that he’s been “hearing about [voter fraud] for a long time.” In the interview, he expanded on the comments he made earlier at rallies and referenced the voting sites in minority neighborhoods of urban areas like Cleveland and Philadelphia — both major population centers in two states that are critical to Trump’s electoral chances — in which the 2012 Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney received hardly any votes.

Roger Stone: “You have to inoculate early on this." | Getty Images

“You had precincts where there were practically nobody voting for the Republican,” Trump said. “And I think that’s wrong. I think that was unfair, frankly.”

Reached Tuesday, Stone, who has no official affiliation with the campaign, said he’s pleased Trump was seemingly following his outside advice. “You have to inoculate early on this. You have to educate people to the fact that this is a real possibility.”

Pennsylvania, which a Republican presidential candidate hasn’t won since 1988, may be the linchpin to Trump’s strategy — the blue state he absolutely has to steal, given his weak position in other swing states. Inside his campaign, there is an awareness that Trump will have to improve somewhat on Romney’s dismal performance in Philadelphia’s urban and suburban precincts and a belief that the city’s “machine politics” pose a serious obstacle. “The level of voter fraud in Philadelphia is epic,” a campaign source said.

But there is also an awareness of Trump’s glaring problem with African-American voters, as reflected in public and private polls (a Marist survey last month showed Trump getting zero percent of the vote among African-Americans in Ohio and Pennsylvania). “Internal polling shows that even Hispanics are more gettable than African-Americans,” the source continued. “For whatever reason, Trump just can’t move African-Americans.”

In this context, Trump floating the idea of a stolen election or fraud in urban areas looks more like a candidate already planting the seeds of an explanation for an eventual loss.

“On some level, he knows he's running a scam on the Republican Party,” said Stuart Stevens, the chief strategist on Romney’s 2012 campaign. “They put more Trumps onstage at RNC than Hispanics. At some level, he knows this is a con, just like when he said Trump University would make you rich and he knew it wouldn't.

“He's just preparing himself for the humiliation of defeat. His problem is he doesn't have a pre-nup with voters — they get to decide. He can't rig it in advance. The whole idea of a guy who inherited a company, inherited all his wealth, and is now talking about a ‘rigged system'? He is the poster child of a rigged system living on Fifth Avenue."