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There is no law. Just as there is no law that you have to release your tax returns.
I think it's more of a stretch to claim there's no norm against calling for a foreign entity to help you win the election.
There isn't now though, that's for sure.
Yet losing candidates are expected to congratulate their opponents and concede (it was noteworthy that Clinton didn't have a concession speech).
Again, less of an expectation with Abrams' thing + Biden pre-complaining about the midterms.
That was a joke. That was always an obvious joke. Vox even had an article saying it was only a joke in poor taste, and not a serious request, which was memory-holed two or three years later when the first impeachment began.
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The problem with most of these proposed "norms" is they either seem to have been made up entirely after the fact, or they end up being suspiciously gerrymandered to only cover Trump's behavior and not the very similar behavior of other politicians.
Just out of curiosity, which of those two buckets do you feel "don't ask enemies for political help" and "avoid calling elections rigged" each fall into?
Both of those are "made up entirely after the fact". The "don't ask enemies for political help" has the added issue of being obvious rhetorical flourish, not a serious request.
Given that the Russians did in fact hack and leak John Podesta's e-mails on behalf of the Trump campaign, why should I believe people who say he was joking when he asked them to do the same to Hillary Clinton? I think Henry II was probably joking when he said "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" but he doesn't get the benefit of the doubt after Thomas a Becket is murdered.
That's like saying Al-Qaeda did 9/11 on behalf of Bush.
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The first can be disregarded, as it was an obvious joke. If he had actually intended to ask a foreign enemy for political help, he would have done it secretly, they way Ted Kennedy did with the Soviet Union in 1984. As for the second, I dispute that "avoid calling elections rigged" has ever been a norm, as you can easily dig up counterexample throughout history. Hillary Clinton herself has repeatedly suggested that Trump's victory was rigged by the Russians, and as was pointed out to you, both of Bush's elections had their authenticity repeatedly and vigorously called into question. Stacy Abrams has practically made a cottage industry out of challenging the legitimacy of her gubernatorial loss, to widespread acclaim and media adulation. So, if one were to posit that such a norm did exist, it would have to be heavily gerrymandered to exclude all these examples.
The actual norm is that losing candidates do not challenge the transition of power with force, but of course Trump didn't do that, so that's not helpful to criticizing him.
This is "words have meanings" pedantry, but Hillary Clinton did not accuse the Russians of rigging the election. A "rigged" election is one where the declared result deliberately does not match the votes cast. The Russians tried to rig the election (by hacking voting machines), but failed - the Clinton campaign and affiliated left-establishment groups had conceded this by the end of November. Other people, notably including Jill Stein, continued to run with the idea after it became clear that it didn't happen, but Clinton did not.
What Hillary said, correctly, was that the Russians improperly helped Trump by hacking and leaking John Podesta's e-mails. This is "interfering" with the election, not "rigging" it. Hillary Clinton and people speaking on her behalf have always been quite careful about this distinction, even if the broader left have not. The distinction matters because calling an election "rigged" is an implicit call to change the official result to match the votes cast, but (at least in the US) a complaint about interference is a call to punish (either judicially or politically) the people responsible without throwing out the validly cast votes.
There was no attempt by the Clinton campaign or anyone affiliated with it to overturn the 2016 election on grounds of Russian interference. Jill Stein requested recounts in several key states in accordance with state law, and they didn't find anything untoward.
Politics does not work by the rules of criminal trials. In the ordinary English meaning of the word, Trump (among others) incited the Jan 6th riots, which were an unsuccessful attempt to prevent the orderly transition of power by force. He should not have done this, and no other Presidential candidate has continued to publicly challenge an election after exhausting his State-law remedies since Hayes-Tilden in 1876. The fact that we can't prove the causal link between Trump's incitement and the events of Jan 6th 2021 means he probably can't be prosecuted for it (and in any case, he would probably be protected by the 1st amendment), but it doesn't mean that he didn't do it. As I have said elsewhere, if the King says "Who will rid me of this turbulent priest?" and Thomas a Becket gets murdered, he loses the benefit of the doubt.
In any case, the argument that Trump sought to overturn the 2020 election by force is not restricted to the Jan 6th riot. Per the evidence gathered by the House Select Committee, Trump held a meeting in the Oval Office on 18th December at which he suggested rerunning the election under martial law. Michael Flynn made the same suggestion publicly on multiple occasions, and there is reasonable evidence that he was doing so on behalf of Trump. Again, probably not enough evidence for a criminal conviction, but enough evidence for the establishment to conclude on the balance of probabilities that Trump would have overturned the election by coup if the military had co-operated.
I think "The President does not conduct coup plots in the Oval Office" is, and always has been a norm of American politics that Trump violated.
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