title:  Even Fox News Is Slamming Trump’s ‘Dangerous’ Rigged Election Talk
text: Donald Trump is so far-out and detached from reality that even Fox News has had enough. After declaring, three months out, that the election will be rigged to favor  crooked  Hillary Clinton, the public knew exactly what was going on   Trump is already preparing for a loss.But even though Trump has shown he can t lose with grace, media outlets are not letting him get away with the insane assertion that an entire national election, which requires the participation of all 50 states to work, will somehow be  stolen  from him.And Fox News may have delivered the most brutal smackdown of this assertion.In a recent op-ed, Julie Roginsky, who runs a crisis management firm, slammed Trump for lacking the  patriotism to put his country and its institutions ahead of his own ego  and delegitimizing the American electoral process:Never in modern history has the loser of a presidential election challenged the legitimacy of our national elections.  Even in these times of unprecedented partisan rancor, candidates have put partisanship aside in the interest of patriotism and national unity.  What has separated the United States from third-world nations is our fundamental faith in our institutions and the belief that our laws supersede political strife.This week, Donald Trump changed all that.  Even before the first vote has been cast, he informed Sean Hannity that our electoral process was fundamentally illegitimate, that our democracy was as subject to political whims as that of Putin s Russia or Mugabe s Zimbabwe.Over 240 years of a nation that prides itself on fair, open and honest elections, crapped on in one minute by a racist reality-T.V. star. All that work, that bipartisanship and good-spirited nature, gone, because the fat, orange blob said so.While giving no evidence as to how, and citing the often debunked claims of voter fraud, Trump is successfully convincing his base that he s such a winner that if he loses, it must be because the states and the party elite are in bed for Hillary Clinton (even though multiple polls have her beating Trump by over 10 points). He s even successfully convincing his supporters that the United States is a corrupt entity, with a secret group of elites who enforce a dictatorship-like approach when determining who wins presidential elections.This is why  citizen presidents  like Trump and Jill Stein are so damaging to our electoral process   everyone is crooked but them.Roginsky then drew a parallel between the great Al Gore and Trump:Despite being urged by many of his supporters to keep fighting during the Florida recount in 2000, Vice President Al Gore conceded the election to Governor George W. Bush in the interest of national unity, stating that,  [T]onight, for the sake of our unity as a people and the strength of our democracy, I offer my concession. George W. Bush s election was certified by a Republican secretary of state in Florida, where his brother was then governor.And with a conservative Supreme Court handing the victory to Bush, still Gore did not complain one iota. He accepted the results, and was poised like a real leader should be   disappointed, but supportive of our institutions.Trump is completely inept, and the fact he s already preparing for a loss (which he calls rigged) shows that he has failed to grasp how America s most sacred institutions work.Featured image via Scott Eisen/Getty Images