So the question is: Are we looking at a total act of self-destruction, or does Trump the Shlump have something else up his sleeve? As for whether nobody, including Trump, can stop the collapse, I like National Review Editor Jonah Goldberg’s comment after the Sunday night debate:
‘It’s like a plane that is going down, but at least they got the coffee maker working again.
But how do we explain the extraordinary behavior at a rally the very next day in which Trump evidently luxuriated in leading the crowd in a “Lock Her Up” chant that went on for a minute or more? Because the truth is that Shlump-o got a lot more negatives about calling for Hillary’s jail-time during the debate than he got no matter how many women he groped or didn’t grope.
What’s going on? Does he really want to lose? Or does he know that he can’t win no matter what he says from here on out so why not run the remainder of this campaign for reasons that have nothing at all to do with 2016?
The reason I ask that question is because I am increasingly convinced that his talk earlier in the year about running as a 3rd-party candidate, when he first started going in loggerheads with the RNC, has come back as a possible motive for what he plans to do after this election is come and gone.
This information may be a bit out of date, but the Tea Party Caucus in the House consists of 44 members from 20 states. Right now, Princeton Consortium says Trump’s comfortably ahead in 20 states. If he were able to pull those 20 states out of the GOP orbit, guess who owns the GOP? And what would it take him to quickly build a political infrastructure in those states that would support a Trumpian-list of candidates in every Congressional district in 2018?
I’ve been listening to Limbaugh and the other alt-right noisemakers say that the GOP keeps shooting itself in the foot because they won’t give a ‘real’ Conservative a chance. And right now it appears that the definition of ‘real’ Conservative is whether you want to see Hillary go to jail. Which is why I suspect that we haven’t yet seen or heard just how vicious Trump’s message will be. After all, he’s no longer playing for small stakes like winning or losing in 2016; he’s got a whole country to gain.