Is Hillary Clinton Running a False Flag Campaign to Elect Donald Trump?
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This week, Democrats and leftists in America were bombarded with the disconcerting news that in the battleground states of Florida, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, Donald J. Trump is either leading Hillary Clinton or locked in a dead heat. Worse, voters in those states consider Clinton less trustworthy than Trump by significant margins. Those numbers were corroborated by a New York Times/CBS News poll that came out today, indicating that 67 percent of potential voters think of Clinton as dishonest. Last month, that poll found that Clinton held a six-point lead over Trump; this month, they’re tied at 40-40. According to the Times, the drop is largely due to the FBI’s finding of “extreme carelessness” in her handling of a private email server, which has further eroded the public’s trust:
The investigation undercut many of Mrs. Clinton’s statements over the past 18 months to explain and defend her decision to rely on the private server at her home in Chappaqua, N.Y…Mrs. Clinton and her campaign celebrated the Justice Department’s decision not to indict her as a legal victory, but the political fallout appears significant, at least for now.
Most surprisingly, the Times/CBS poll shows that as of today, only 28 percent of voters hold a positive view of Clinton. All of this has happened, it should be noted, at a time when Trump’s campaign seems to be in total disarray—if there was ever a time for Clinton to deliver a killing stroke, this was it. Instead, she’s somehow lost ground.
In a normal presidential election, Clinton’s metrics would be a recipe for a quick and decisive failure. History shows us that her unfavorability ratings—56.4 percent, in the latest average of polls—are higher than any major party nominee since at least the ‘70s, and possibly ever. Facing even a below-average opponent on the Republican side, a candidate saddled with these unprecedented handicaps would inevitably lose, and lose badly.
But this is not a normal election, and Clinton’s opponent is not a normal Republican. Instead, she’s facing Donald Trump, a man who routinely gets caught in intentional lies, blustering half-truths, and endless embarrassing episodes of political ignorance. And when I said that Clinton’s numbers were historically poor, I was leaving out a giant asterisk—the only major candidate with worse metrics in modern memory is the man she’s facing today. Trump’s unfavorability ratings are even higher at 59.8 percent, and as the Times’ Nicholas Confessore and others have shown, his appeal is based almost entirely on white anxiety and varying degrees of racism. He is widely considered a dangerous candidate, and some even believe he’ll usher in an era of American fascism. There has never been a legitimate contender for the White House who inspired so much fear in so many people, and in a different year, he’d be a fringe extremist with no prayer of winning.
So ask yourself this, as a mental exercise: What would it take to make a Trump victory possible? What circumstances would have to align to facilitate such a bizarre, anomalous result, for which there is no historical precedent?
The answer, of course, lies with his hypothetical opponent. It would have to be someone who is so loathed, so mistrusted, and so singularly unpopular that principled leftists would stay home, starving that candidate of base support, while independents could convince themselves that voting for Trump was a reasonable, lesser-of-two-evils act. You see where I’m going—that opponent, losing support on all sides and making Trump seem less and less deplorable by comparison, would look lot an awful lot like Clinton.
As we watch her unfavorability numbers approach Trump’s (at 56.4 percent, she’s closer than she’s ever been to his 59.8), and as we see polls roll in indicating that voters actually trust Trump more than her, we’re watching this nightmare scenario unfold. It’s no longer a mental exercise—this is game theory in practice, and the unlikely circumstances of fate necessary to elect a lunatic like Trump are actually falling into place.
You could call it extremely coincidental, but scientific minds are trained not to believe in extreme coincidences—especially when the reality they create is so mathematically and politically improbable. What are the odds of a candidate so despised that he or she would open the door to a cretin like Trump? Too long, I’d argue, to happen by accident. If someone tossed a penny in the air 1,000 times, and it landed on heads 1,000 times, would you believe that you’d just witnessed a miracle of chance? Or would you believe that the penny was, in some way, rigged to land that way? Occam’s Razor tells us that the simplest explanation is the best, and I’m not one to believe in the voodoo of the statistically absurd. These outcomes have to be intentional, and anyone who believes otherwise is self-deluding and credulous to a dangerous degree. Which leads to my theory:
Clinton is running a false flag campaign, with the secret goal of helping Trump win the presidency.
Your next question is an obvious one: Why would she do this?