By
It’s been nearly a week since poor job numbers forced Donald Trump to confront evidence of his own failures. Presented with data showing job growth in the United States slowing to a 16-year low, the president, in true authoritarian fashion, fired the head of the Labor Department’s Bureau of Labor Statistics without cause.
In the hours and days that have followed, the Republican condemned his own administration’s jobs data as “ridiculous,” “phony” and a “scam,” but during his latest appearance on CNBC, there was another adjective he repeated more than once. Trump told viewers:
The numbers were rigged. ... Where did those numbers come from? Highly political. It’s a highly political situation. It’s totally rigged. Smart people know it. People with common sense know it. A lot of people like their head under the covers and just not believe it. ... The numbers were rigged, okay?
He seemed rather serious about this.
In the same interview, the Republican, still clinging to nonsensical conspiracy theories about his 2020 election defeat, claimed that race was “a rigged election, 100% rigged.”
For now, let’s put aside the fact that neither the job numbers nor the 2020 election were actually rigged. Let’s instead consider the familiarity of the president’s choice of words.
Pretty much everyone, especially those who communicate regularly with the public, has rhetorical tics that routinely appear in their remarks and printed works. (I’m mindful of the fact that I have plenty of my own.) But Trump’s dependence on “rigged” has been ridiculous for years.
Ahead of the 2016 elections, for example, the then-candidate told supporters, “We’re in a rigged system, folks. This is a rigged, rigged system. ... Our system is rigged, and I was the first one to use that term.”
In the weeks, months and years that followed, Trump said polls are “rigged.” And the Republicans’ 2016 primary process was “rigged.” And the Democrats’ 2016 primary process was “rigged.” And the Commission on Presidential Debates was “rigged.” And the NFL’s schedule was “rigged.”
At one of the 2016 debates, Hillary Clinton told viewers:
Every time Donald thinks things are not going in his direction, he claims whatever it is, is ‘rigged’ against him. The FBI conducted a year-long investigation into my emails. They concluded there was no case; he said the FBI was rigged. He lost the Iowa caucus. He lost the Wisconsin primary. He said the Republican primary was rigged against him. Then Trump University gets sued for fraud and racketeering; he claims the court system and the federal judge is rigged against him. There was even a time when he didn’t get an Emmy for his TV program three years in a row, and he started tweeting that the Emmys were rigged against him.
That was true, by the way: Trump really did claim that the Emmys were “rigged.”
Even after Trump won the 2016 race, he said it was “rigged,” too.
Naturally, he just keeps going. Special counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation? “Rigged.” Google search results? “Rigged.” He 2024 criminal trial in New York? “Rigged.”
This is a partial list, and we could keep going, which is precisely the problem. The president appears to work from the assumption that he’s a brave hero, constantly having to fight valiantly to overcome a world that’s “rigged” against him by nefarious and conspiring forces.
In reality, his over-reliance on the term has had the opposite of the intended effect: Given his track record, whenever Trump describes anything as “rigged,” the public can safely assume the opposite is true.
This post updates our related earlier coverage.