I have a theory. It’s so far-fetched, even I don’t believe it. But if enough people start talking about it, maybe it’ll help our country. Or it’ll hasten our demise. I have no idea, I’m just a blogger, so take everything I write with your daily recommended allowance of salt.
Unless I’m right, and then YOU HEARD IT HERE FIRST, FOLKS.
Here goes:
Donald Trump is an agent provocateur, leading a false flag operation on behalf of the Democratic Party.
Stop looking at me like that. Suspend your justified disbelief and hear me out.
Sometime in the recent past, in the era when he was shtupping Stormy Daniels, watching Shark Week, boinking Karen McDougal, and becoming a father for the fifth time, the Democrats pitched Donald on a remarkably absurd plan:
Donald Trump would play a caricature of an angry, narcissistic strongman, using populist rhetoric to attract the worst elements of society to his cause. The aims were thus:
1) Expose for the masses the Republican base’s barely-hidden tendencies toward racism, xenophobia, sexism, ableism, and homophobia.
2) Drive GOP leaders to defend Donald’s objectively sociopathic behavior, sacrificing their alleged moral high ground on the altar of Trumpism.
3) Provide would-be bad actors with attractive opportunities to openly act badly.
4) Rally millennials, people of color, women, and supporters thereof, to mobilize as they focus their anger on an orange, puffy, made-for-TV embodiment of everything wrong with modern American politics.
If it all went according to plan, the net result of this Manchurian candidate’s “success” would be the marginalization of the Republican Party for a generation or more.
It would be a long shot, obviously. He’d have to win the GOP primary against approximately 743 other low energy, lyin’, and little candidates. He’d have to stop porking randos and paying them to keep quiet about it. He’d have to beat Hillary Clinton in a national election.
If he fell short, he’d still gain millions of dollars of free publicity for his personal brand. And the Democrats would still achieve partial victory on all of their stated goals…and retain the presidency.
But if he won, he’d achieve a massive victory in the long game on behalf of the Democrats.
As you scoff, it’s important to remember that Donald Trump was a Democrat for most of his life. As recently as the 2009, Trump was actively registered as a Democrat in New York. In the years before that, he was touting Democratic leadership and donating to Democratic candidates. Sure, he’s always been a loudmouth, self-aggrandizing racist. Of course, those characteristics aren’t mutually exclusive with being a Democrat.
But those characteristics, combined with his lifelong political leanings and unilaterally self-centered motivations, made him the perfect Trojan horse.
The Pied Piper Of The Poorly Educated
It must be exceedingly difficult to be an Ivy League educated congressman representing the will of an assortment of juggalos and juggalas from the greater Methmouth, Kentucky (pronounced METH-muth, like Dartmouth, or like Scooby Doo saying “xmas”) metroplex. The population of the greater Methmouth area wants political changes that simply can’t be brought up in polite company in 2019.
It’s not just Methmouth, Kentucky, that presents this challenge. It’s any number of town names that I am presently stealing/making up: Papsmear, Wyoming; Dingleberry, Mississippi; or Winchestertonfieldville, Iowa all have the same issue.
Their United States Representatives, adept in code-switching between “it’s 2019” and “y’all reckon dem Yankees gon’ make us start marryin’ other fellers?” walk a fine line every day. Their starched shirts, perfectly styled hair, complete sets of teeth, and faux intellectual policy arguments provide perfect cover for the insidious personal wishes of their constituents. The congressmen work hard to keep America just as backwards as their voters want it, but they do it with media-friendly vocabulary and presentation.
For example, if the collective brain cell of Methmouth is convinced that Black folks (of whom they know zero) in the inner city (to which they’ve never been) are cheating the welfare system (of which they are likewise beneficiaries), their congressman can’t just say that on Fox News. Even blatant racists like Tucker Carlson would at least feign indignation.
Instead, their congressmen will talk about fighting hard for “fiscal responsibility” and “entitlement reform.”
Methmouthians know exactly what he means. He means he’s going to vote to take money away from unworthy “welfare queens” and redirect it to people who deserve it: namely, the citizens of Methmouth, Kentucky. And Methmouthians will keep that money in the community, using their newly found appropriations to buy local, artisanal, small batch OxyContin. The financial ripple effect will be felt from back alleys to abandoned warehouses and every truck stop bathroom in between.
The rest of America can be forgiven, though, for hearing a U.S. Representative talking about entitlement reform on Meet The Press and assuming he literally means reforming our country’s social safety net. “After all, he never said a single word about race. Why are you trying to make it about race? Doesn’t that make you the racist?” says every keyboard ninja on Reddit in unison.
Enter Donald “I Tell It Like It Is Because I’m An Old School Racist And My Filter Has Been Destroyed By Decades Of Adderall Abuse” Trump.
Methmouth’s population gathers around the only TV they haven’t pawned yet to see their neon god descend the golden escalator. That only sounds like a euphemism for bathroom stuff, I promise.
Rather than using coded language and fancy “coastal elite” words, this guy speaks in language the average man (read: far below average man who thinks he’s average, largely because he’s barely ever left his hometown full of other below average people) can easily understand.
Finally! Someone important enough to be on TV stopped dancing around the issues and just directly confirmed our longstanding poor, rural, white biases. Our jobs left the scenic Methmouth Valley area because Mexican rapists came and took them! We’re poor because Obama gave all of our money to inner cities! Middle America is not falling apart because we’re destroying it ourselves; it’s falling apart because someone else—someone brown, foreign, or brown AND foreign—is destroying it!
In comparison, Methmouth’s distinguished congressman starts to sound like a disingenuous, fast-talking Washington swamp-dweller. He’s not really on our side, he’s a globalist cuck, just like the rest of the establishment. What’s a globalist? What’s a cuck? I have no idea, but those are things people who “tell it like it is” call people who are equally shitty, but who lack the balls to “tell it like it is.”
For years, the national media stood as a gatekeeper to national politics. In America, you can’t reach the masses unless your message conforms to certain norms. Norms like “don’t be objectively, blatantly racist,” or “be able to explain your reasoning and sources without repeatedly sniffing like a coked-up night club promoter while finishing every thought with ‘believe me, okay?’”
Like it or not, those norms are policed by the nation’s major networks and newspapers.
If, in order to reach your audience, you need approval from “mainstream media” types, you can’t say stuff like, “Mexicans are mostly rapists and drug dealers.” The media will stop inviting you and stop covering your rallies. Case in point: the media rarely covers the policy positions of the Aryan Brotherhood or the KKK. To do so would risk legitimizing their opinions. And losing advertisers. But mostly legitimizing their opinions.
But in a truth that will be studied intensely in generations to come, if you say crazy stuff and literally millions of hill folk put on their red hats and loudly, angrily agree with you, the media will follow you. They’ll give you thousands of hours of airtime. Millions of angry people is itself a story, irrespective of why they’re angry.
In other words, if the media elites won’t take your heinous message seriously, just disrupt the model that requires their validation in order to get coverage. Even when they won’t lend legitimacy to your awful content, they have to pay attention to your numbers.
Lest you think it’s just that easy, it takes more than a suspension of one’s filter.
Jeb or Lyin’ Ted couldn’t have done it. Marco Rubio, Ben Carson, Chris Christie…none of them could have done it, either. They all have track records of being covertly shitty, but rarely overtly so.
Donald Trump, however, has authenticity in the realm of being a dick. It’s not an act. He’s not breaking through a natural instinct to avoid saying the wrong thing. He constantly, gleefully says the “wrong thing” and has been positively reinforced in that endeavor for 70+ years.
And Methmouth, Kentucky saw it, loved it, and excitedly voted for it.
True to the Democrats plan, the message of the modern Republican Party is no longer sanitized and filtered for mass consumption. Today, thanks to Donald Trump’s base and the legitimization the media has granted them, the GOP publicly stands for exactly what it has always stood for in private.
God Chose This Philanderer, So He Must Be Good
The GOP has long branded themselves as the party of family values and morality. The Democrats have long known that branding to be a steaming pile of horseshit.
Unfortunately, the average American does not pay enough attention to politics to see through bumper stickers, slogans, and commercials. Marketing is powerful. Branding works.
For years, the Democrats have been frustrated that people like Newt Gingrich, Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity, Chris Christie, Ann Coulter, Dennis Hastert, and Laura Ingraham, somehow represent the voices of “morality” in America. For some reason, a sizable swath of the electorate ignores objectively immoral behavior as long as the behaver projects enough pearl-clutching dismay at the immorality of our current age.
And that reason is that a sizable swath of the electorate is embarrassingly gullible.
That reality is coupled with a decades-long history of intense Republican “us versus them” messaging. Republicans march in lockstep and toe the party line. Deviate from the Republican message, and you’ll get a well-funded primary challenger who won’t make that mistake.
The sum of those two realities is great news for Democrats: holier-than-thou Republican leaders will stand by their man, even when their man lives the polar opposite of their self-reported family values. That realization led the Blue Team to seek a way to leverage that predictable hypocrisy. That way was named Donald Trump.
If the Dems could get Trump to become “their man,” they’d stand by him. Then, little by little, story by sordid story, it would become painfully obvious that their man’s lifetime of carousing, cheating, lying, and double-dealing behavior didn’t miraculously stop when he changed his “D” to an “R.”
They’d be left with a choice, and they’d choose exactly as the Democrats expected.
(A) Put country before party, denounce the guy at the top, and prove your pearl-clutching was at least occasionally legitimate; or,
(B) Put party before country, and stay in power by rationalizing Donald’s objectively terrible behavior as being wholly congruent with the last 50 years of feigned outrage at all things immoral.
In the words of Colonel John “Hannibal” Smith from TV’s The A-Team, “I love it when a plan comes together.” *cue explosion in the background as B.A. Baracus and I pitch our heads back and laugh hysterically, freeze frame, roll credits.
Daily, we see right-wingers discard their entire careers’ worth of “moral authority” at the altar of Trumpism. Bible-waving politicians are forced to explain how things like “grabbing her by the pussy” are just example’s of Christ’s ability to use broken people to achieve His will on Earth. Russian bribes? God works in mysterious ways, comrade! Three wives? Men make mistakes, but God forgives—especially if those men are going to nominate conservative judges! Obstruction of justice? Let he who hasn’t disrupted an FBI investigation cast the first stone!
And now, thanks to a brilliant Democratic plant, the hypocrisy that would have been difficult for the average voter to see comes equipped with a self-chosen 243-pound flashing orange arrow.
Crooks Gonna Crook
The average American doesn’t steal. Not because they lack opportunities to steal, mind you. The average American doesn’t steal because stealing is wrong. The Golden Rule runs deep in humanity, even when we don’t believe it. The vast majority of us refrain from bad acts because we wouldn’t want bad acts done to us.
Democrats correctly surmised that Republican politicians were not average Americans. They guessed that given the chance, many Republican politicos would gladly pad their own pockets at the taxpayers’ expense. But in order to unlock those tendencies as quickly and wildly as possible, it would help to have a grade-A crook at the very top of the organization.
That crook came in and nominated a bevy of bad guys who barely needed the tiniest nudge to live up to their full bad guy potential.
Secretary of Health and Human Services Tom Price resigned in disgrace after it was discovered he was traveling all over the country on private jets to the tune of hundreds of thousands of taxpayer dollars. As Laura “Even A Broken Clock Is Right Twice A Day” Ingraham said, “It’s hard to see how a cabinet secretary can drain the swamp from 42,000 feet in the plush interior of a taxpayer-funded Gulfstream 4.”
Brenda Fitzgerald, Director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, resigned when her investments in health care and tobacco companies were discovered. Lest you think it was a mere oversight in her ascent to the job, Ms. Fitzgerald purchased the tobacco stocks a month after she took over at the CDC.
Secretary of the Interior Ryan Zinke resigned amid a slew of ethics investigations. Chief among those investigations: a dissection of a sweetheart real estate deal with the CEO of Halliburton, a company that stood to benefit greatly from Mr. Zinke’s decisions with regard to drilling on public lands. He once spent $12,000 of your money to take a charter flight to speak to a hockey team that just happened to be owned by one of his major donors. He blocked a Native American tribe from opening a casino after MGM—who was opening a casino near the proposed tribal land—“lobbied” the hell out of him. Like I said, crooks gonna crook.
EPA chief Scott Pruitt. Secretary of Veterans Affairs David Shulkin. White House aide John McEntee. The list goes on, and I’m only listing people with problems at the intersection of money and ethics. I could list a ton more if I expanded the subject to cover broader corruption, racism, anti-Muslim remarks, anti-LGBTQ remarks, and other such idiotic, public missteps.
You’ve likely heard the old saying, “the fish rots from the head.” It means organizations are reflective of their leaders. If you put a dishonest, corrupt, unethical leader at the top, he’ll not only attract other bad actors like himself. He’ll also give license to would-be bad actors to boldly, publicly act badly.
If you want to demonstrate the fishy ethics of the Republican Party, it’s wise to help them elect the most rotten fish possible.
We Storm The Castle At Dawn
Through the election of Donald Trump, the Democrats achieved three major goals:
First, they stripped the glossy veneer off of the Republicans’ turd of a message. No longer could Ivy League presentation obfuscate the anti-minority, anti-immigrant, anti-everyone-who-isn’t-rich-and-white truth of the GOP’s platform. “Their” new leader was “telling it like it is” for everyone to see. And as much as the GOP base ate it up, the rest of the country was repulsed as the nasty sausage was finally being crafted in full view.
Second, the Democrats painted Republican leaders into a corner, forcing them to defend their President’s abhorrent behavior in stark opposition to their “family values” messaging. They could—and would—still claim the moral high ground. But the counterarguments practically wrote themselves now, and they all featured the living avatar of immorality, hypocrisy, and cognitive dissonance: Donald J. Trump.
Third, the Dems baited corrupt Republican politicians to boldly step over bright lines into blatant unethical and criminal activity. When they placed a cartoonish Mafioso at the helm, the underlings predictably showed their true rotten fish personas for all to see.
Now comes the culmination of this ridiculous-yet-effective plan: focus everyone’s ire on an easy-to-despise common enemy. Rally the troops and finish off the GOP for a generation or more.
Start by organizing all the “nasty women” to don their pussy hats and march on the Capitol in numbers greater than the presidential inauguration just one day earlier. Ride a massive Blue Wave into 2018’s midterm elections, taking back 40 seats in the House of Representatives and switching control to the Democrats. Take back seven state legislatures by winning more than 300 net seats. Undo Republican supermajorities in three more state legislatures. Mobilize young people to oust baby boomer politicians who enact policies to make baby boom-era class mobility impossible.
Republican leaders have always angered politically active liberals. But if you weren’t involved in politics, you probably didn’t notice much of the goings-on of George W. Bush, George H.W. Bush, or Ronald Reagan. Simply “being conservative” isn’t going to inspire legions of previously apathetic Americans to oppose a politician.
Donald Trump is different. Donald Trump purposefully infuriates everyone who isn’t in his base. The Democrats couldn’t have picked a more effective man to consolidate and activate and expand their base.
Maybe I’m completely wrong. It’s possible. I thought I was wrong once, but I was mistaken. But if the Democrats aren’t behind this guy’s single-handed destruction of the Republican Party from within, that means something far simpler:
It means the Republican Party knowingly chose this guy—an embodiment of their worst qualities—and they’re proudly following him as he leads them off a cliff.
And if that’s the case, I sincerely thank them for out-self-destructing the Democrats for a change. It sucks right now, sure. But I’m consoled by looking forward to all of the progress our country will see for the next thirty years as the GOP watches from the sidelines.
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Need some more Hitting The Trifecta right now? Try this one: Guide Him In The Direction He’s Already Falling. Or how about this one? When In Doubt, Don’t Bark. I like this one, too: My Eye! I’m Not Supposed To Get Measles In It!