August 2016

Three months out, Donald Trump has already started warning people the election in November might be "rigged" for Hillary Clinton, telling Republican voters to "watch very closely." Speaking with Fox News’s Sean Hannity, Trump insinuated President Barack Obama beat Mitt Romney in 2012 in fixed election, said his own primary win was rigged "a little bit," that Clinton beat Bernie Sanders in a "rigged" primary, and that Democrats would attempt to rig the 2016 election for Clinton. "I’m telling you, November 8th, we’d better be careful because that election is going to be rigged," Trump said. "And I hope the Republicans are watching closely or it’s going to be taken away from us."

Trump’s new commentary on voter fraud seems to be coming from political strategist and Trump’s close adviser Roger Stone, who told Breitbart editor Milo Yiannopoulos that Trump has to "begin talking about it constantly." "I think we have widespread voter fraud, but the first thing that Trump needs to do is begin talking about it constantly," Stone said. "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. 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.’" Stone added that if Clinton were to "steal" this and win, her inauguration would be a "bloodbath."

A Q&A with Glenn Greenwald, co-founding editor of the Intercept, and best known for his role in reporting on Edward Snowden's disclosure of National Security Agency material.

During the course of the interview, we talked about why media elites have trouble reaching Trump supporters, Greenwald’s differences with WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, and the future of privacy in a world of hacks. Asked, "How do you think about Trump vs. Clinton, given your strong anti-establishment feelings?" Greenwald said, "Just take a step back for a second. One of the things that is bothering me and bothered me about the Brexit debate, and is bothering me a huge amount about the Trump debate, is that there is zero elite reckoning with their own responsibility in creating the situation that led to both Brexit and Trump and then the broader collapse of elite authority. The reason why Brexit resonated and Trump resonated isn’t that people are too stupid to understand the arguments. The reason they resonated is that people have been so fucked by the prevailing order in such deep and fundamental and enduring ways that they can’t imagine that anything is worse than preservation of the status quo. You have this huge portion of the populace in both the U.K. and the US that is so angry and so helpless that they view exploding things without any idea of what the resulting debris is going to be to be preferable to having things continue, and the people they view as having done this to them to continue in power. That is a really serious and dangerous and not completely invalid perception that a lot of people who spend their days scorning Trump and his supporters or Brexit played a great deal in creating."

“No matter how good I do on something, they’ll never write good,” Donald Trump says. Donald Trump appeared on Fox News Channel’s “Hannity” on Aug 1 to complain about The New York Times treating him unfairly, but the way he chose to articulate his point is being mocked by critics and across social media. “The New York Times is so unfair. I mean they write three, four articles about me a day. No matter how good I do on something, they’ll never write good,” Trump said. “I mean they don’t write good.” Trump also said he calls it the “failing New York Times,” because it “won’t be in business” for long and even called out a particular reporter by name. “They have people over there, like Maggie Haberman and others, they don’t — they don’t write good. They don’t know how to write good,” Trump said.