It’s A Conspiracy: Donald Trump Throwing The Race To Guarantee Clinton Win

Disclaimer: I wrote the following story during the 2016 election cycle. This story was written at a time when conventional political wisdom stated that an inarticulate and impolitic businessman with no political experience and multiple fraud and sexual assault allegations pending against him could not possible best a former First Lady/former United States Senator/former Secretary of State in a presidential race — and the tone of the piece reflects that.

Aside from the occasional corrections to spelling/grammatical/syntax/factual errors, the story you are about to read is in its original form.

Because I have no interest in talk of the national debt, I turned away from the third and final presidential debate in the last few minutes. I didn’t need to see the debate in its entirety; Clinton had already won. I also knew that Donald Trump, who simply needed to show up and speak coherently about the issues for ninety minutes in order to win, would blow his last chance at redemption. My prediction was correct.

Trump sealed his fate by repeating his previous debate mistakes — mainly, denying statements of his that were caught on tape and spouting one crazy conspiracy theory after another.

According to Trump, so-called partial birth abortions allow viable full-term fetuses to to be “ripped out” of their mothers’ wombs days before birth. According to Trump, Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton founded ISIS. According to Trump, Obama and Clinton also paid people to incite violence at his rallies. According to Trump, Hillary Clinton deleted more than 30,000 emails to cover up financial misdeeds at the Clinton Foundation — something that, according to Trump, the Haitians hate her for. And, no, according to Trump, the Russians aren’t responsible for the Wikileaks hacks that have beleagured the Clinton campaign. And, yes, according to Trump, all of the women who have come forward to accuse him of sexual harassment and outright sexual assault are lying, having been manipulated by the Clinton campaign.

After I got done laughing at some of Trump’s more outrageous statements, I got to forming my own conspiracy theory. Maybe just maybe Trump’s over-the-top boorishness is just an act, an act designed to guarantee that Hillary Clinton became the first woman to serve as President of the United States.

This little conspiracy theory of mine makes more sense the more you think about it. After all, the two candidates were once friendly enough for Trump to invite Clinton to his third wedding. He once said that Hillary Clinton would be a good president. Their daughters, Chelsea and Ivanka, are on friendly terms and, up until fairly recently, Trump was a registered Democrat who took socially liberal positions on gay rights and abortion. And a former supporter claimed that Trump was never “in it to win it”, originally intending for his candidacy to be a protest.

On top of all that, Trump hasn’t done any of the things that eager-to-win presidential candidates do. In fact, Trump seems intent on sabotaging himself at every turn. He never even properly financed or staffed his campaign, something that cost him critical momentum in swing states.

And he came right out and said that he believed that Mexicans were rapists and that Muslims, supposedly celebrating the 9/11 attacks, should be banned from entering the country. Why did he encourage white supporters to beat up people of color protesters at his rallies? Why wouldn’t he quickly denounce his former birtherism or more quickly distance himself from David Duke and other white nationalists who clutter up his Twitter feed? For that matter, why would he call for the reinstatement of stop and frisk during the first debate or stubbornly refuse to apologize to the Central Park Five, a group of teens that Trump villified in the press. Wasn’t Trump aware that better politicians had ruined their careers by expressing much subtler racism ? Didn’t Trump know that he could simply dog-whistle to people who already believed those things?

Intentional self-immolation would also explain his constant, nearly reflexive, degradation of women. Women make up more than half of the American population and are more committed to voting than men are. There’s no way the Donald and his handlers didn’t know how politically damaging his attacks on Rosie O’Donell, Megyn Kelly, Alicia Machado, and a host of other women were. Or that making creepy remarks about dating his own daughter would turn people off. The timing of the Access Hollywood hot mic scandal is also suspect; apparently NBC had been sitting on the recording, only airing the tapes when a rival network scooped them. Is it possible that Trump, enjoying a long working relationship with the network, asked NBC to wait on publicizing the tapes until their discovery was the most damaging to his campaign? And Trump had to have known that stalking a much-smaller Clinton around the stage during the second debate would only intensify negative perceptions of him and increase sympathy for Clinton.

Trump also would have known that this particular brand of assholery would appeal to certain segments of the American population, a segment whose entrenched sense of white (male) privilege and economic desperation would prompt them to jump on the racist sexist far-right bandwagon. There are people in this country who will never vote for a woman, no matter how qualified, and who will never adopt progressive political stances, even if those positions work for them. And Trump is fully aware that his behavior has encouraged many fence-sitters to support Clinton whether they like her or not. Despite his lack of political experience and the vacuousness of his policy positions, Trump could have easily beaten Clinton, a politician with historically low popularity ratings, by adopting a more conventionally presidential air.

The whole “Trump’s throwing the match” scenario makes even more sense when you consider who Trump picked as a vice-presidential candidate. Indiana governor Mike Pence had a high national profile for all the wrong reasons. Vehemently anti-gay, the supposedly Christian Pence pushed legislation that would have allowed business owners to cite religious objections when denying service to members of the LGBTQ community. Anti-choice, Pence ruthlessly pushed to defund Planned Parenthood. Consequently, Pence is indirectly responsible for the largest outbreak of HIV in Indiana history. Trump may have been kowtowing to the Christian Right by putting Pence on the ticket but he had to have known that Pence wasn’t palatable to most Americans.

As harebrained as this conspiracy theory is, there is a real possibility that Donald Trump is a real life Manchurian candidate. I refuse to believe that Trump and his campaign staffers didn’t know that his increasingly outrageous behavior wouldn’t put his (female) opponent in the Oval Office. That being said, Donald Trump will become the first presidential candidate in history to lose to a woman.

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