The Divider: Trump in the White House, 2017-2021

by Peter Baker

This was an old playbook for Trump. Anytime he was beaten in any kind of contest he cried foul. When The Apprentice lost an Emmy to The Amazing Race in 2004, he complained that the awards were a con game. “We were robbed!” he fumed as he stormed out of the auditorium. “They cheated us!”[10] When Republicans lost the 2012 presidential race, he called the election “a total sham.” When Ted Cruz beat him in the Iowa caucuses in 2016, he cried “fraud,” and claimed that “Cruz didn’t win Iowa, he stole it.” In the fall of that year, fearing he would lose to Hillary Clinton, he said the outcome was “absolutely being rigged”—until he actually won. Even then, while victorious in the Electoral College, he claimed that Clinton’s three-million-vote margin in the popular vote was fraudulent, an assertion for which his own handpicked commission found no evidence. A search of Trump’s public statements on the Factbase website going back to 2012 found that he had questioned voting or suggested that an election would be rigged, unfair, or otherwise compromised 713 times.[11] And that was before Labor Day.