When TRUMP wins...

"Our voting system is distributed, ancient and counties and states are only marginally competent at pulling them off at all. The idea you could rig such messy business in advance is just plain stupid on the face of it. That's not to say you can't have people in positions of power like Katherine Harris who can bend the results after the fact.

And if it were going to be rigged anywhere it would be in red states, not blue ones."

TRUMP'S PROBLEM WITH WOMEN KEEPS GETTING WORSE:

    Four women who competed in the 1997 Miss TEEN USA beauty pageant said Trump walked into the dressing room while contestants — some as young as 15 — were changing. From BuzzFeed: “I remember putting on my dress really quick because I was like, ‘Oh my God, there’s a man in here,’’ said Mariah Billado, the former Miss Vermont Teen USA. Trump, she recalled, said something like, ‘Don’t worry ladies, I’ve seen it all before.’ Three other contestants also remembered Trump entering the dressing room while girls were changing, saying the girls tried to cover their bodies, with one calling it ‘shocking’ and ‘creepy.’”

    Former Miss Arizona Tasha Dixon corroborated the reports: “He just came strolling right in. There was no second to put a robe on or any sort of clothing or anything,” the 2001 winner told CBS Los Angeles. “Some girls were topless. Others girls were naked. Our first introduction to him was when we were at the dress rehearsal and half naked changing into our bikinis. To have the owner come waltzing in, when we’re naked, or half naked, in a very physically vulnerable position and then to have the pressure of the people that worked for him telling us to go fawn all over him, go walk up to him, talk to him, get his attention.” (Fred Barbash)

    These women are coming forward after it emerged that Trump bragged about strolling through dressing rooms while contestants were changing during a 2005 interview with Howard Stern. “I’ll tell you the funniest is that I’ll go backstage before a show and everyone’s getting dressed,” Trump said. “… I’m allowed to go in, because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it…. ‘Is everyone okay’? You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. ‘Is everybody okay?’ And you see these incredible looking women, and so I sort of get away with things like that.”

-- In next door Maine, Gov. Paul LePage (R) actually said yesterday that “authoritarian power” may be needed in the United States.

“Sometimes, I wonder that our Constitution is not only broken, but we need … [Trump] to show some authoritarian power in our country and bring back the rule of law,” his longtime supporter said during a radio interview.

People close to Ted Cruz said after the convention in Cleveland that the Texas senator would not endorse Trump because he saw his former rival as an authoritarian in the mold of Benito Mussolini.

Now Cruz is sticking with someone who he sees as a strongman — and who has also suggested that his father was somehow involved in the assassination of John F. Kennedy and who has criticized his wife’s physical appearance.

-- History will not be kind to these Trump collaborators in the GOP establishment, conservative thought leader Ross Douthat argues in an important column for today’s New York Times:

“In bending the knee to Trump last spring, they thought that they were buying party unity and a continued share of power, and paying for it with just a little of their decency, a mite of their patriotism, a soupçon of their honor.

They may find out soon enough that all this bargain bought them was an even harsher reckoning, and that all they will inherit is the wind. … History in its day to day is not a morality play. But sometimes there is a clear chastisement, a moment when the judgments of providence seem stark. And so it may be for the men who led the Republican Party into its Trumpian inferno.”