New Yorker - "Trump and the Trurth: The 'Rigged' Election" - Spoiler, the GOP Is Rigging It!

Here is the great irony that the Republicans long standing efforts to pain elections as being rigged against them with Donald Trump being the chief conspirator in chief has pretty much painted the GOP in a corner. All the talk from Republicans calling on Trump to resign is just to give establishment Republicans plausible deniability. Otherwise, if the GOP elites are successful in pulling of their coup d'etat, doesn't this prove that Trump was right all along about a rigged election, except that it was not the Democrats who rigged it, but Trump's fellow Republicans. Worse, Pence is the one who was the chief backstabber by refusing to lift a finger to defend Donald Trump during the VP debate, then working with other Republicans to set himself up to step in at the earliest opportunity.

Put another way, the Republicans engaging in a backroom deal to replace Donald Trump would simply confirm the Republican base's wildest accusations about the system being rigged against their popular choice.

http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/trump-and-the-truth-the-rigged-election

The election is going to be rigged—I’m going to be honest,” Donald Trump said to a rowdy crowd in August, at a rally in Columbus, Ohio. “People are going to walk in and they’re going to vote ten times, maybe,” Trump told an interviewer later. A few days afterward, in Pennsylvania, where Trump was then lagging by nine points in the polls, he warned supporters that “the only way we can lose . . . is if cheating goes on.” That week, a new page appeared on his campaign Web site, inviting concerned citizens to volunteer to be “Trump Election Observers” so that they could “help me stop Crooked Hillary from rigging this election!”

At the first Presidential debate, Trump and Hillary Clinton were asked whether they would accept the ultimate outcome of the election. Trump evaded the question at first, before winkingly conceding that he would. But after the debate he went right back to his routine—more talk of rigging. Those polls that said Clinton had won the debate? They were skewed against him, he said, just like Google was, with its suspiciously pro-Clinton search results. At campaign stops this week, Trump reiterated his claims that Clinton was out to steal the vote. He even told the Times that he was reconsidering whether he’d accept a Clinton victory at all.

As my colleague Amy Davidson has discussed, Republicans have spent years, beginning well before Trump’s campaign, warning voters that devious people were trying to cast illegitimate ballots to swing elections. They gave the problem a tidy, intuitive-sounding name: voter fraud. But, in an especially toxic political gambit, Trump has taken this concept to the extreme: trying to delegitimize a national election even while campaigning for the Presidency.

* * *
Republicans themselves have stoked this paranoia. Over the past decade, Republican officeholders in dozens of states have used the threat of voters casting multiple or illegitimate ballots to justify imposing onerous identification requirements at the voting booth, measures that have often gone hand in hand with efforts to shorten early-voting periods before Election Day. An estimated eleven per cent of eligible voters, more than twenty million people, do not have any form of government-issued photo I.D., and minority and lower-income citizens, who tend to vote for Democratic candidates, are disproportionately represented in that group. (As are college-age voters and the elderly.) A number of Republican Party officials from across the country have actually admitted to manipulating the threat of voter fraud to their advantage.