This article was first published on December 10, 2015
Is Donald J. Trump running a false flag campaign to help Hillary?
This idea was originally floated as a Republican Party conspiracy theory back in August, but failed to gain any traction by virtue of Donald Trump’s abrupt surge in national GOP polling. That’s changing now, as reality is starting to dawn on The Donald Show.
The GOP has got a fundamental problem now. Presently, the Republican Party has its own hands half-tied – unable to fully distance themselves or condemn Trump’s recent call to ban all Muslims from entering the US, or even Trump’s somewhat disturbing call on Monday to “close down parts of the internet.”
The reason the GOP’s hands are tied is because Trump isn’t the only candidate invested in this litany of reactionary policy rhetoric in the GOP’s now legendary race to the bottom – as a still bloated field of presidential candidates rush to gather all the lost political souls before February, by pandering to the radical right and the remnants of a scattered Tea Party base. Any remaining Republican moderates, like Rand Paul, are currently buried under Trump headlines, and left to fight for the scraps with a motley crew of war hawks (Christie, Graham, Fiorina), accidental runners (Carson), TV evangelists (Huckabee) and potential Wall Street servants (Cruz, Bush, Rubio, Kasich). In the end, GOP pollsters can only watch as their moderate support gradually melts away and with it, their chances for a November win.
Even RNC Chairman Reince Priebus caved in to the mob recently, treading on egg shells over Trump’s ‘Muslim ban’ controversy. When questioned about Trump’s near ‘final solution’ to his Muslim problem, Priebus gave a (right-wing) politically correct answer: “I don’t agree,” said Priebus to the Washington Examiner. “We need to aggressively take on radical Islamic terrorism but not at the expense of our American values. That’s as far as I’m going to go” (yes, the right-wing has its own politically correct whip too).
So why is the GOP brain trust so afraid to condemn Trump’s fascist rant? Answer: they are scared of Trump going it alone as third-party independent.
Whether or not Trump’s comic book-style candidacy is contrived and calculated to divide the party base, or just the Real Donald – might be up for debate, but there can be no debate about the end result – should Trump choose to run a third-party ‘Independent’. A Trump third-party run will split the Republican vote enough to all but guarantee a comfortable Hillary Clinton and Democratic Party presidential victory in the general election.
Today, Trump raised his big, gold Atlantic City-style Sword of Damocles over the GOP’s neck again:
“The people, the Republican party has been — the people have been phenomenal, the party I’ll let you know about that. And if I don’t get treated fairly, I would consider that. In fact they did a poll… where 68% of the people that were Republicans would follow Trump if I went independent”
Trump is making no secret of this reality either, constantly war-gaming his options on Twitter, much to the dismay of a paralyzed Republican establishment…
A new poll indicates that 68% of my supporters would vote for me if I departed the GOP & ran as an independent. https://t.co/ztP5d2ctZl
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) December 8, 2015
Even the geniuses at FOX News are in denial of this tectonic rift in the GOP structure. Go figure…
This pathogen has also spread to the legions of “conservatives” and “constitutionalists” who have rushed to buy the now iconic red Trump baseball cap (Made in America) are similarly boxed-in by Trump’s exclusionary authoritarian decree to deny members of one religious group, American Muslims and their families, access to rights guaranteed in the US Constitution. The fact that so many who identify themselves politically as ‘conservatives’ and ‘libertarians’ have been handicapped by this dichotomy speaks volumes about the authenticity of their political and ideological labels. In other words, there is nothing conservative about big government police state measures favored by nearly all of the GOP runners, with the most radical being Donald Trump.
Trump and his supporters are also facing another huge wall. Even if Trump somehow wins the GOP primary vote going into the Republican National Convention next July, it is almost certain that the scene at the Quicken Loans Arena in Cleveland on July 18 – 21, 2016, will be a political bloodbath – pitting rabid Trump mobs against the RNC’s traditional rank and file.
The trouble doesn’t end there either. The GOP are also scared about the potential that Trump politics could lead to party stereotypes that might end up permanently damaging the party’s image – in way that could be devastating not only for 2016 Congressional and Senate elections, but across the board nationally in local and state seats as well. Again, the Democratic Party must be cheering on Trump because he could deliver them the grand slam sweep of Congress and the White House which they would not have dreamed was possible only a few months ago.
This Summer Meltdown scenario is a very real one. For anyone with a long enough memory (something that’s increasingly rare these days) to recall, this same issue took place in 2012 when chaos broke out on the Tampa Florida GOP Convention floor back in 2012, when Ron Paul supporters were locked-out and delegates disenfranchised by their own party. Clearly, none of today’s Trump supporters raised a fuss back then to protest the railroading of Ron Paul, but come July, they will wish they had. Because of the Ron Paul movement, the RNC moved to further centralize party power at the all-important convention choke-point. As the New American has reported previously:
“The RNC’s rule change effectively disenfranchised Republicans supporting anyone other than the Establishment’s man and left 10 of Maine’s 24 delegates locked out of the process, preventing them from casting votes for Ron Paul.”
“It’s a disgusting, disgusting display of a hostile takeover from the top down,” said Maine delegate Ashley Ryan, according to an article in the Los Angeles Times. “It’s an embarrassment,” she’s quoted as saying.
And here’s the real kicker:
“Additional rule changes all but guaranteed that in the future the RNC will not allow itself to be embarrassed by “grassroots” candidates.”
In other words, no matter how much muscle you think you have coming out of the GOP primaries, the system may already have been gamed in favor of the preferred Establishment candidates. Watch this clip from 2012:
If what happened to Ron Paul 2012 also happens to Trump 2016, it’s almost certain that Trump will look to his mob for support and to restore some of his power lost to a labyrinth of electoral bureaucracy. Most of this will be way too complicated for the average Trump supporter (and Trump himself) to fully grasp, and expect Donald to call for a rebellion. Supports can scream and shout, boo and even threaten violence all they want on the Convention floor this summer, but pundits and supporters would be naive to discount this political reality. Unless the Establishment wants Trump (for instance, if Bilderberg requires an autocrat to fast-track its agenda), which remains a remote possibility, then his supporters will never get the fair shake they think he deserves.
This leads to the third scenario: Trump wins the primaries, but fails to secure his party’s support at the Convention. This will almost certainly lead to his supporters crying foul and demanding a third party independent run, after which time he runs and splits the GOP vote down the middle, which will (once again) deliver the Democratic Party’s likely nominee, Hillary Clinton, a comfortable victory in the general election come November.
The only real chance then for the GOP is find a way for Trump to not run at all in the general election. Good luck with that one.
The GOP is a party divided, and until they rectify this fundamental flaw of their own making – constantly battling with each other to win the adoration of an increasingly confused, frightened, and ignorant (and shrinking) voting base, they will continue to lose in general elections.
Either way, thanks to Donald Trump, the Republican Party have their work cut-out for them.
