Response to After Trump

(See: Just Above Sunset: After Trump)

I’m starting to think that Donald Trump is actively trying to lose this thing after all. If so, the question is, why?

Has he, as a friend of ours suggested a few months ago, thrown in with the Clintons, and been trying to engineer Hillary's victory from the very beginning?

After all, as conservative Republicans have said all along, he has a history of holding liberal positions — deficit spending on infrastructure programs, for example — and saying nice things about Hillary Clinton, and pointing out (correctly, by the way) that the economy always seems to do better under Democratic administrations. In short, he can make his place in American history, by engineering the final demise of that so-out-of-control Republican party.

Or maybe we need to go back and take a closer look at that story being pushed in late March by Stephanie Cegielski, who had been Communications Director of Trump's short-lived "Make America Great Again" Super PAC: 

Even Trump's most trusted advisors didn't expect him to fare this well. 

Almost a year ago, recruited for my public relations and public policy expertise, I sat in Trump Tower being told that the goal was to get The Donald to poll in double digits and come in second in delegate count. That was it. 

The Trump camp would have been satisfied to see him polling at 12% and taking second place to a candidate who might hold 50%. His candidacy was a protest candidacy.

But then things went tragically awry.

What was once Trump's desire to rank second place to send a message to America and to increase his power as a businessman has nightmarishly morphed into a charade that is poised to do irreparable damage to this country if we do not stop this campaign in its tracks. 

I'll say it again: Trump never intended to be the candidate. But his pride is too out of control to stop him now. … He doesn't want the White House. He just wants to be able to say that he could have run the White House. He’s achieved that already and then some.

Tired of him always talking about building a wall and having Mexico pay for it, she supported the campaign’s decision last October to shut down the Super PAC, "in order to position him as the quintessential non-politician".

So maybe Trump is just trying to cover his ass for after his inevitable loss?

But what’s odd is, while everyone seems so certain he’s going to lose on November 8th, at least Nate Silver doesn’t see that it will be a landslide, which is defined as a double-digit margin in the popular vote — Silver sees that separation, at least right now, to be only 7-8%.

Nor, if those 538.com numbers hold, will he be held down to the "one state, plus Washington DC" of both George McGovern in 1972 and Walter Mondale in 1984. In fact, right now, it looks like Trump might end up winning 21 states.

And that may be enough for the Trumpistas to survive as a viable political movement after the election is over. In fact, not just a movement, but a movement bearing arms, and knowing how to use them.

And speaking, as we were yesterday, of people believing the Second Amendment was designed by the founders as a defense against government tyranny, by the way, brings up the question of what they think their actual revolution would look like. Do they imagine themselves mowing down a company of heavily-armed IRS tax accountants, approaching their homes with intentions to take away their guns?

More likely — and I hope those in the Trump National Front realize this — it would be American soldiers! You know, as in, “Support-Our-Troops" American soldiers? Not to mention, with tanks and planes and cruise missiles and whatnot, people who swore an oath to protect the Constitution from enemies both foreign and … (wait for it) … domestic! Did you ever imagine you’d end your life as a “domestic" enemy of your country?

Although I also wonder what would happen to this movement if Trump were to announce on the day after the election that his presidential bid, as many had suspected, was all a fake campaign, maybe designed specifically to knock out any serious contender to Hillary Clinton’s chances of winning.

I’m wondering, for example, what the reaction will be of all those on the Trump Surrogate Brigade — not just all those blond women but also Rudy Giuliani — who were, on a daily basis, left to spin in the wind on CNN as they struggled to come up with some ingenious explanation for something Trump had said the day before, even after it was obvious that nobody, not even his fellow Republicans, was buying it anymore.

But will Trump pay them anyway? I can’t wait to see if Rudy Giuliani will settle for thirty-cents-on-the-dollar.

In any event, we have a little under three months to let this saga play out to its illogical conclusion, but I’m sure that will give the candidate himself enough time to find something else to keep us entertained, the most obvious of these that comes to mind being his dropping out of the race before election day, maybe on the pretense that he refuses to participate in a rigged election.

And especially one in which he is getting so obviously “schlonged” -- and by a girl.