“No way this could have happened,” President Donald Trump wrote on TruthSocial early Monday morning. “Rigged Election!”

While he could reasonably have been referring to any number of elections he’s deemed “rigged” over the last decade, in this instance, Trump had turned his bleary eyes to the Los Angeles mayoral race, where a progressive challenger, city council member Nithya Raman, has pulled ahead of reality TV heel-turned-crystal-enthusiast-turned Republican candidate Spencer Pratt. Raman is now set to face incumbent Karen Bass in the general election; her lead over Pratt came from mail-in ballots, which always take a long time to count in California, in part because of stringent verification processes.

But Trump, naturally, smelled something foul. A few hours later on Monday, he posted that it was “Not possible for Spencer Pratt to have lost the L.A. runoffs after the big lead he had. 3rd World Nation. Rigged Elections! Now they’ll be working on great guy Steve Hilton. Won’t have results for, possibly, TWO WEEKS.” (Trump has, of course, regularly waged attacks on voting by mail, even though he’s done so himself.)

As the president indicated, votes in the California governor’s race are also still being counted; the Republican candidate, conservative commentator Steve Hilton, is still ahead of Democratic billionaire Tom Steyer in a battle for second place. Whoever wins it will face former Biden HHS secretary Xavier Becerra, the top finisher.

Apart from his ongoing fulminating on TruthSocial, Trump also stormed out of an interview with NBC’s Meet the Press that aired on Sunday after Kristen Welker pushed him to substantiate his claims that the California gubernatorial elections were “rigged.”

“You’re either crooked or you’re stupid,” he told her, shortly before walking off set. “You play right into their hands with this crap. You know that these elections are rigged. Your network knows that they’re rigged.”

Ever since California’s June 2 primary election, the president and his supporters have pushed........

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