The claim that Donald Trump was a Manchurian candidate — somehow developed by Russia to do its bidding in exchange for a couple of lucrative real estate deals and some generous financing from financial institutions — was always obviously bogus.
But have we given enough attention to another possibility? What if he is a Democratic plant, the product of a brilliant conspiracy by the progressive left to help achieve the kind of social and economic transformation of the country that Americans would otherwise never conceive of voting for?
Is it possible that for the past six years we have all been the victims of one of the greatest double-bluffs in political history? That even as Democrats and their messengers in the media whipped up the idea that the US had been hijacked by the Kremlin, they were the ones manipulating the Republican Party’s political processes to get their way?
Think about it, sheeple! The lurid stories of romps in Moscow hotel rooms, mysterious visits to Prague by senior Trump aides, coded communications between a state-controlled Russian bank and the Trump campaign — all made up. But might they just have been an elaborate smoke screen to disguise the real collusion, between the all-powerful Democratic machine and a man of no previously fixed political abode who suddenly became a Republican president?
The media had to go to elaborate lengths, involving shadowy figures from British intelligence and helpful lawyers and tech executives making up dirt about Russia and Trump when all along we actually had pictures of the “Republican” candidate in compromising positions with leading figures in the Democratic hierarchy!
All right. I’ll stop there before someone actually starts to think I’m serious.
But an insane conspiracy theory might be as good an explanation as any of how Trump somehow keeps coming to the rescue of the Democrats just as they look to be burying themselves in their own extremism, hypocrisy and unfitness for office.
The thought is prompted by the former US president’s broadside last week, in which he more or less instructed his supporters to do something that should produce Democratic landslides in forthcoming elections.
“If we don’t solve the Presidential Election Fraud of 2020 (which we have thoroughly and conclusively documented) Republicans will not be voting in ’22 or ’24. It’s the single most important thing for Republicans to do,” read the former president’s statement.
It’s not as though the strategy hasn’t worked perfectly before. In January, incensed by his failure to convince enough people that he had actually won last November’s US election, he and some of his so-called aides suggested voters in Georgia shouldn’t bother showing up in the state’s Senate runoff election because that too was going to be rigged.
The result: Just enough Republicans who had voted in the first round last November declined to follow up in the January 5 runoff, and we got Two Senators Who Changed the World. Or at least tried to.
To that helpful intervention by Trump can be attributed trillions of dollars in prospective tax and spending increases, several confirmations of far-left Biden nominees, and this continuing offence against sanity: Senate budget committee chairman Bernie Sanders.
And this is the gift that keeps on giving to Democrats. If Trump’s latest campaign is successful, he may well deter just enough voters from going to the polls in next month’s knife-edge Virginia governor’s race, thereby handing the Old Dominion to a Democratic Party that thinks it owns your children and has the right to tell them what to think.
As it stands, we are governed by among the most incompetent, ideologically extreme, dishonest governments in living memory. If the normal laws of political gravity were to apply, the Democrats should be headed for an epic defeat in next year’s midterms, with Republicans sweeping away the tiny Democratic majority in the House, breaking the tie in their favour in the Senate, strengthening their grip on statehouses and governors’ mansions across the country, and rescuing the country from the lunacy of the Sanders-AOC political condominium.
But if Trump gets his way, none of that will happen.
It’s important to state this again. There was a lot wrong with the 2020 election, from the Democrat-managed and Democrat-friendly explosion in mail-in voting to late rule changes, in some cases improperly implemented to facilitate more Democratic voting, and the disgraceful way in which media and tech companies sought to manipulate opinion in favour of the Biden campaign.
But that doesn’t qualify as the great Presidential Election Fraud Trump is prepared to throw over the future of the country to prove. It certainly needs to be redressed — and the best way to do that is to elect politicians who will redress it. The kind of Republican voter suppression he seems to crave benefits only one party — and again it’s not the one the former president claims to support.
The Wall Street Journal
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