TRUMP’S WOULD BE NO ORDINARY DEFEAT, Holman Jenkins writes in the Wall Street Journal. Well, it wouldn’t be an ordinary defeat for a Republican, at least:

Mr. Trump has learned the value of audacity. He might well decide to cover his retreat and preserve his amour propre with a flurry of lawsuits and conspiracy theories about a “rigged” election.

He’s already begun putting narrative flesh on these bones. He speaks of “crooked Hillary” and increasingly of the Clinton Global Initiative, Bill Clinton’s philanthropy, and what he calls the Clintons’ “politics of personal profit and theft.” In his trade speeches, he portrays the Clintons as members of a nefarious global elite that has enriched itself while foisting impoverishing trade deals on the U.S. middle class.

He perhaps will throw in a few suggestions that foreign governments hold hidden leverage over Hillary because of her hacked, illegal email server. He’ll mention Bill Clinton’s pardon of Marc Rich.

Republicans can also expect to be a target of his accusations. He doesn’t need to be plausible, just tell a story that justifies his own stance that he didn’t lose, the other side cheated, “Washington elites” conspired against him, etc.

So in other words, if Trump loses, he’ll act exactly like the left did after November of 2000. And the same media that treated Bush as “selected not elected” will tut-tut his divisiveness as some new strange alien behavior without realizing they created the precedent for it.