The Los Angeles Times is reporting that President Donald Trump urged his supporters to act like crooks in November's election, with columnist Mark Z. Barabak writing that the president asked attendees at a Republican midterm convention in Dallas to raise their right hands and swear an oath to "cheat like hell."
The Times said Trump delivered the remarks on the final night of the two-day gathering, in the second of two keynote speeches. It said Trump told the crowd they should go out with family and friends and vote on November 3rd or earlier, adding that he did not care whether they were registered.
The Times said Rick Hasen, director of the Safeguarding Democracy Project at UCLA's School of Law, described the comments as no laughing matter. Hasen said Trump framed his remarks as though he were making a joke, but that joking about such a thing is deadly serious.
The column said the episode is worth revisiting as the country moves toward an election now less than six weeks away. It said Trump's political strength has never rested on knowledge, intelligence, compassion or empathy, but on his ability to overwhelm outrages that would buckle others, a function of sheer velocity in which one offense is quickly superseded by the next.
The Times said the approach echoes the tactic that strategist Steve Bannon once described as flooding the zone, and that it was employed by the red-baiting Joseph McCarthy, whose aide Roy Cohn later mentored Trump.
The column said Trump's performance as president has always carried a certain amount of shtick, particularly before a rapturous crowd, and that he entered politics from reality television. It said his norm-breaking has been celebrated by acolytes as simply "Trump being Trump."
The Times noted that Richard M. Nixon, in the throes of Watergate, famously declared, "I am not a crook." It said Trump, whose approval rating is slumping toward Nixonian levels, is now urging Americans to act like crooks.