That came to an end very quickly, and he hasn't said anything since then. There are two good reasons for that:
1. Who would even bother voting in a "rigged" election?
2. To people like me, this came across as an arrogant A-hole with a huge ego preparing excuses in case he lost.
I'm sure someone intelligent in his campaign leadership pointed one or both of these out, and the whole story went away.
I feel bad for you if you actually made assumption 2 when most of us were concerned about this for years and disgusted when the Romney camp didn’t blink an eye.
The rigged system talk was sheer genius.
It accomplished many objectives including:
1) discrediting his insider GOP rivals who had accepted contributions from the large doners.
2) discrediting Clinton, who was also financed by the same big doners.
3) gaining crossover sympathy support from Sanders, who was campaigning against the same rigged system.
4) it energizes voters like nothing else. (you couldn’t be more wrong about a rigged system causing voters to stay home). It’s the ultimate call to action: “don’t let them steal the election from you”
5) another advantage - it’s true. The system IS rigged. The truth is a powerful thing.
Regarding people like you seeing it as an excuse for losing - that makes no sense at all - he has been winning all along. His brand is winning. He never needed an excuse in case he lost. When he said the system is rigged, he always added but we’re winning anyway.
The point of saying “its rigged” is not just about the election - it’s the whole system, the economy, policy, bail outs, everything is rigged. That’s why you need new people in the White House - not the same families that rigged everything in the first place.
He obviously knew the ultimate way to energize voters is to point out all the ways the globalist insider establishment are conspiring to hold onto power by disenfranchising voters who the power really belongs to.
It’s not often you have a line of attack that works just as well against rivals in your own party as it does against the other party.
Also your theory that some intelligent staffer convinced him to stop using that line of attack - wrong again - he still uses it.
The line is “you can’t expect these problems to be fixed by the very people who rigged them in the first place”. Then points out he is financing his own campaign. Nobody owns me. I’m spending a lot of my own money. The only peopke I’ll be working for is you, and you, and you. (points to peopke in the audience)
This is still the center piece of his campaign and it is what got him this far - it gets s huge reaction every time.