It wasn’t that long ago that one prominent Republican got into campaign-season trouble trashing Americans as “a nation of whiners.” How the tables have turned: now, president Obama is bashing Donald Trump as America’s national whiner.
Blame Trump’s woeful idea to tell his supporters the election is rigged against him—and them. That, Obama warned, “doesn’t really show the kind of leadership and toughness you want in a president. You start whining before the game is even over? If whenever things are going badly for you, and you lose, you start blaming somebody else? Then you don’t have what it takes to be in this job.” Obama’s advice: “stop whining and go try to make his case to get votes.”
Of course, many Trump supporters would probably counter that the threat of election-rigging are part of the case for Trump. Unwilling or unable to run a broad-based populist campaign—probably a decent political move at a time of widespread frustration and disillusionment—Trump has turned conspiratorial in his attacks on America’s bipartisan elite. That’s red meat for his core supporters, many of whom believe the whole point of voting Trump is to crack the elite’s malevolent control of the world’s big institutions.
Alas, there’s just no evidence that Democrats (or anti-Trump Republicans, or Libertarians, or lizard-person Freemasons) are secretly sabotaging the vote. In fact, it’s Trump’s chums in Moscow who are accused of messing with our electoral process—by the U.S government itself! And the Wikileaks email revelations currently embarrassing some media industry figures have only served to confirm that no matter which powerful people are in the tank for Hillary, Trump’s descent from “winner” to whiner has been nobody’s fault but his own.