Donald Trump has recently brought up the threat of electoral fraud
leading to his defeat in November’s election. His repeated comments are
interpreted by many in the fact-based world in several ways:
- He is trying to scare his supporters into turning out on Election Day to cast their votes for him.
- He knows he will lose and he is making excuses in advance.
- He is sending a signal to his followers that they should refuse to accept the results of November’s vote and instead participate in some sort of revolt.
I think there is a likelier true fourth explanation: he
believes what he is saying.
Donald Trump is not a person who has spent much time
studying the deeper currents of electoral politics in the United States. He has
a notoriously short attention span and shockingly thin skin. If the current
polls are an accurate reflection of voter preference, it is an existential
threat to Donald Trump’s dreadfully under-developed self. To keep his
hyper-exaggerated ego inflated, Trump must dismiss the polls as wrong or
crooked.
The same is true for the vote totals in November. If he
losses in November, it can only mean one thing---the totals are fraudulent and
the Presidency has been stolen.
To people out here in Factland, the idea of massive
electoral fraud at a national scale is unsupported by ANY evidence.
But to Donald Trump the idea that he might not be liked by
voters is equally unsupported by ANY evidence.
Three or four or five times a week he is the star attraction
at rallies with thousands of enraptured supporters who cheer his every word. It
is clear to him that The People love him. What he does not get is that people love him, but The People do not.
He believes only what he sees and feels rather than what is happening away from
his tiny, tightly controlled universe.
He is just like Kim Jong-un in that over time he has
surrounded himself only with people who tell him how beloved he is, how great,
how amazing, how revolutionary, how huge! Other voices with other opinions have
a hard time making their way in. When an occasional alternative view makes it
to Mr. Trump’s ears, he immediately and reflexively dismisses the source as
somehow hateful or biased.
He believes his own good press and dismisses everything else
as wrong. Of course he would say that
electoral fraud would be the only way he could lose in November. At his center,
Donald Trump is a small person who has never learned to think or feel outside
of his own under-developed intellect and over-indulged id.
