When Donald Trump stated his belief that the US presidential election was rigged, it was treated by media outlets and the Democratic party as an unprecedented challenge to democracy itself.

But was Donald Trump the first person to ever challenge the results of a presidential election?

How quickly people forget. The results of the US presidential election has been challenged, and it was actually very recent. In the year 2004, George Bush won reelection. By a landslide. That did not sit well with left-leaners. While John Kerry himself shortly afterwards conceded the election, there were diehards who would not accept an extension of the Bush presidency, including Larry Chin of FromTheWilderness.com and Bob Fitrakis of the ironically-named FreePress.org. If Donald Trump can be called unpatriotic for challenging an election system he believes is rigged, certainly the same could be said of bloggers who were leftists back when leftism was fashionable.

But, the challenge wasn’t issued by John Kerry himself, so it’s not like he was being a poor sport. So then, was there a previous presidential candidate who directly challenged the results of the presidential election?

Yes there was. Does the name “Al Gore” ring a bell?

Yeah, that guy. Not only did he challenge the results of the election in the state of Florida, he brought the issue to the Supreme Court, which then gave the election to Bush. Gore made a spectacle of the American electoral process, which resulted in America being mocked abroad for our difficulties in selecting a leader. At that time, Floridians who claimed that the ballots were confusing sided with Kerry. I’ll let you consider whether you want to count the votes of those who don’t understand how to cast them.

Leftists, I get it. You don’t like admitting that your favorite guys lost to Bush, the guy who’s portrayed as a chimp in political comics and has no apparent knack for public speaking. That’s embarrassing. This might have something to do with the fact that neither one of them became the frontrunners for their party again.

However, when Donald Trump accuses Hillary Clinton and the DNC of cheating, leftists trip over themselves to make him out to be a threat to democracy, not remembering what they themselves once said back when Bush campaigned and won.

Personally, I liked it better when Donald Trump said it. Not that he’s providing much in the way of evidence to back up his claim, nor do I know for sure what kind of information he has access to.

However, Trump did bring something against Clinton that I wouldn’t put past her. She was the one who staged an event where she hugged a child after collapsing at a 9/11 memorial event as though she were okay, then claimed to have been diagnosed with pneumonia just days prior (This is irresponsible, because pneumonia is the single highest infectious cause of death in children worldwide. Saying that she lied wouldn’t be much of a defense.). Hillary Clinton is the one who hired a child actor to feed a scripted anti-Trump question to her at an event.

And, worst of all, after Hillary Clinton was asked to turn over emails as part of an investigation, she then deleted them and proceeded to have her old Blackberrys smashed with hammers. It was bad enough that she used a private email server when she should have known that that was illegal. She couldn’t have claimed ignorance when she deleted the emails that she was ordered to turn over. Isn’t tampering with evidence in an investigation called “obstruction of justice”? At the very least, she knowingly defied a court order. How did she avoid getting arrested?

And, in any case, how was conspiring against Bernie Sanders to deny him the Democratic nomination any less detrimental to the electoral process?