It is 2020, after all, and there is no global shortage of demagogues and authoritarians making a joke of democratic processes. They stuff ballot boxes, jail opposition leaders, harass journalists, and threaten voters. They exploit all the tools at their disposal to rig an election in their favor. They increasingly welcome elections, in fact, with recent scholarship showing “that elections can actually prolong dictatorships in the longer term,” as three European political scientists put it.
What they don’t do is adopt the bizarre tactic President Trump has. Neither I nor any of the political scientists and journalistic colleagues I consulted could come up with an example of a national leader trying to preemptively invalidate the upcoming election that he’s forecast to possibly lose.
It is neither incorrect nor unduly crude to say here that Trump is both stupid and full of shit. He’s simply gone from being a terrible candidate to a terrible president, and in the process he’s decided to turn his longshot reelection into a referendum between him and America’s Constitution-based electoral system, again.
Article submitted by, Great Gazoo.