The Donald can't lose

In the late 1980s, the joke was that Mikhail Gorbachev had to be a CIA mole because everything he did seemed to weaken the Soviet Union and hand victory in the Cold War to our side.

The flaw in the theory was that no real mole would have been that obvious about it.

Those thoughts keep popping up because some have suggested, at least half seriously, that Donald Trump is a Democratic plant, tasked with wreaking as much havoc as possible from within the Republican Party's ranks.

The idea would be funny if it weren't for the fact that, like Gorbachev and the USSR, it is hard to see what he would be doing differently if he wasn't.

Trump can't win the Republican nomination and knows it--a reality which begs the question of why he's running. And, more precisely, given his past allegiances, why he is running as a Republican.

Those who cite poll numbers as evidence of the seriousness of his candidacy only betray their ignorance of the irrelevance of poll numbers this early on--Kim Kardashian or Pee Wee Herman would probably have similar leads based on name recognition alone.

Yes, Trump has something of a fan base, but one that almost certainly has more to do with reality television and politics as a variant thereof than substance. His fans seem to be as unfamiliar with his positions on the issues as he is, leaving us with the substitution of bluster and ego for knowledge and coherence.

It was perhaps inevitable that our coarsened and vulgar popular culture would eventually seep into and contaminate our politics, and Trump is merely the first to grasp the implications of this.

Trump isn't a Republican; he's only pretending to be one. His goal has never been to win the GOP nomination; it is to attract as much attention as possible and promote his "brand." The Republican Party is simply his temporary vehicle of opportunity, to be discarded after serving its purpose and as advantage dictates.

Trump is doing precisely what he set out to do, which is pick a fight with the GOP establishment and Fox News and with whomever else on the Republican side can be provoked. His entire electoral strategy depends upon being condemned and ostracized and eventually thrown out of the GOP altogether.

Such an outcome would bolster his maverick appeal and allow him to do what he has wanted to do all along--run, or at least threaten to run, as a third-party candidate. His campaign for the GOP nomination has from the beginning been a mischievous hoax in service of self-promotion.

If Republican leaders are forced to publicly grovel at his feet to prevent such a third-party bid, Trump wins, or at least is perceived as winning. And if the GOP bows and scrapes insufficiently, he could get 15-20 percent of the know-nothing vote in the general election, put his old friends the Clintons back in the White House, and show the Republicans who is boss.

In both scenarios Trump will be nicely positioned thereafter to advance his interests in the crony-capitalist age, to extract the best "deal" from the highest bidder.

But the broader point, and the one we will never be allowed to forget, is that Trump must always be seen as a "winner." He never gets fired because he does all the firing.

Trump doesn't expect to be elected president (and wouldn't have a clue what to do if he, through some fit of national madness, somehow were), but he wants desperately to be the guy who decides who gets elected president.

Just to show everyone he can.

When viewed in such a context, the mysterious phone conversation that Bill Clinton and Trump reportedly had shortly before Trump declared his candidacy becomes less mysterious. As in how difficult is it to imagine Bill, smooth-talker, political mischief-maker, and supreme flatterer that he is, subtly pumping up The Donald's ego (always looking to be inflated) and slyly encouraging him to throw his hat into the ring for the good of the Republic, which needs a real leader and mover and shaker in public life like him?

The Clintons are, of course, acutely aware of how Ross Perot essentially handed Bill the presidency in 1992 by siphoning the vast majority of his nearly 20 million votes (18.9 percent of the total) from incumbent George Herbert Walker Bush. And it wasn't only that Perot took more votes away from Bush; it was that he also directed virtually all of his campaign fire at him as well, just as Trump would direct (already is directing) all of his at the GOP rather than Hillary.

But the hunch is that Trump all along has had his own agenda, first step of which was to infiltrate the Republican Party as a means of later holding it hostage. Go third party and he destroys the GOP's chances, choose not to in the face of what are likely to be plentiful blandishments, and the GOP has a chance.

Either way, Trump's in charge and it's his call. And the Clintons will be highly interested parties.

One wonders how many of Trump's supporters know they are being played for suckers in the "art of the deal."

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Freelance columnist Bradley R. Gitz, who lives and teaches in Batesville, received his Ph.D. in political science from the University of Illinois.

Editorial on 08/24/2015

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