October 15, 2016

Trump: Election Is Rigged. Ryan: No It Isn’t.

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Here is Donald Trump today in Maine talking about Hillary Clinton:

She wants 550 percent more coming from Syria than the thousands and thousands that our president, quote “president,” has coming in.

Charming, isn’t it? And if Obama isn’t a legitimate president, then Clinton won’t be either. Here is Trump in New Hampshire this morning:

Hillary Clinton is the most corrupt person ever to seek the office of the presidency—and the media, donors, special interests who support her will do everything they can to cling to their power and their prestige at your expense. You know it, I know it, they know it….Hillary Clinton should have been prosecuted, and she should, right now, be in jail.

….It looks to me like a rigged election. The election is being rigged by corrupt people pushing completely false allegations and outright lies in an effort to elect her president….We can’t let them get away with this, folks….Remember this, it’s a rigged election….It’s a rigged election…It’s a rigged election.

Trump has been spinning up his supporters for weeks about this. If Clinton wins, she’ll be an illegitimate president. The election will be a sham. If the corrupt elites declare her the winner, don’t accept it. Fight back. In a sense, this is just standard Trump bluster. But it’s worse than that: this is banana republic talk, and with 24 days left in the campaign, Paul Ryan finally repudiated it:

Speaker of the House Paul Ryan issued a rebuke of GOP presidential nominee Donald Trump Saturday, criticizing comments that question the validity of the electoral process.

In a statement, a spokesperson for the highest-ranking elected Republican said Ryan is “fully confident” in the nation’s elections system. It comes on the heels of Trump’s claims that the election is “rigged” against him by “globalist elites,” elements of the federal government, and the press. “Our democracy relies on confidence in election results, and the speaker is fully confident the states will carry out this election with integrity,” said Ryan spokesperson AshLee Strong.

This is a little late, but it’s still welcome.

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THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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