This was in line with comments from Roger Stone, a longtime adviser to Trump. In a recent interview with Breitbart’s Milo Yiannopoulos, Stone said that Trump should start talking “constantly” about the chance of voter fraud and a rigged election. “He needs to say for example, today would be a perfect example: ‘I am leading in Florida. The polls all show it. If I lose Florida, we will know that there’s voter fraud.’ ” Stone continued in this vein. “ ‘If there’s voter fraud, this election will be illegitimate, the election of the winner will be illegitimate, we will have a constitutional crisis, widespread civil disobedience, and the government will no longer be the government.’ ”

From here, Stone’s language gets ominous. “If you can’t have an honest election, nothing else counts,” he said. “The government will be shut down if they attempt to steal this and swear Hillary in. No, we will not stand for it. We will not stand for it,” Stone said, promising a “bloodbath” of “civil disobedience.”

You could say that there’s nothing new here, that earlier Republicans have brought similar rhetoric to the table, and thus that this—if there’s a difference at all—is one of degree and not of kind. In the aftermath of 1960, allies of Nixon alleged fraud. And again, in the wake of Obama’s 2012 victory, Alex Jones and other conspiratorial figures obsessed over the idea that the election was stolen. But this eludes fine details. For instance, neither Nixon’s allies nor Alex Jones was a candidate for the presidency of the United States. This world we’re in, in which a major party campaign maligns the election as rigged well before the fact and promises a proverbial “bloodbath” in the event of defeat, is a new one.

It’s possible that this is just impulsive nonsense from unscrupulous men with no bearing on the election. But I wouldn’t dismiss it. Presidential nominees matter. What they say matters. Trump is a major party leader in an age of rigid partisanship. Not only has this bound reluctant lawmakers to his campaign, but it’s given him a definite floor for votes in the general election. If he loses, it won’t be a landslide. It might even be close. Which makes this language dangerous.

A Donald Trump who accuses the Democratic campaign of fraud—who says Hillary stole the election from him—is one who has allies and enablers within his party. It’s one who has an audience with millions of voters, primed to believe in an epidemic of fraud and stolen elections, where “fraud” often means black and Latino voting.
What happens if Trump loses the election, and he claims fraud? What happens when hundreds of thousands of his most loyal followers—fed on a diet of anger and rage—convince themselves that the race was stolen from their tribune? The simple truth of American politics—and of democratic life at large—is that our institutions are only as strong as the norms around them. Those norms are the superstructure of democracy; they help us navigate conflict and mediate change. When they’re violated, either by unaccountable elites or by reckless politicians, we suffer. And right now, one of those elites is undermining them for the sake of his own ego, stoking fear and distrust just so he can lose the election without losing face.