They can’t, but I think I can.

Donald Trump is the Post-Modern Candidate, who isn’t really running to win office at all.

It should have been obvious months ago, but the commentariat is only beginning to take notice the second week of August.

Erik Erikson, 10 August: If Trump wanted to lose to Clinton, what would he be doing differently?

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Damon Linker, The Week, 11 August, Something Is Going On With Donald Trump:

The media just can’t shut up about Donald Trump. In no small part, this is because his behavior appears to be inexplicable.

Where the most gaffe-prone big-league politician might go off the rails once every week or so, Trump does it several times every week, and sometimes several times every day. And where the most gaffe-prone big-league politicians quickly take back their verbal flubs, clarify, and apologize, hoping to move on before inflicting maximal political damage on themselves, Trump invariably doubles down, needlessly dragging out the controversies for endless days.

This seemingly self-destructive behavior has spawned, in turn, a cottage industry of armchair psychologizing of the man, who’s been repeatedly diagnosed as suffering from narcissistic personality disorder or maybe just “insanity.”

Something is going on with Donald Trump. But we don’t need a precise clinical diagnosis. It’s possible to examine Trump’s behavior over the past few weeks and reach a tentative understanding of his bizarrely self-subversive and flagrantly unpresidential statements and actions, including his tendency to flirt with inciting political violence.

Trump wants to lose the election.

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The Hill, 11 August, Dem Accuses Trump of Sabotaging His Own Campaign:

Donald Trump is trying to sink his own campaign, Rep. André Carson (D-Ind.) contended Thursday.

“It appears as if he knows he will not be the next president of the United States, so he’s trying to sabotage this thing because he’s not used to losing,” Carson said during a press briefing in the Capitol.

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Face it, Trumpkins, you’ve been had.

Donald Trump isn’t a conservative. Donald Trump is not a down-home American like you. Donald Trump is a conniving, cynical New Yorker. He’s 70 years old, fabulously wealthy, already famous and already living a completely sybaritic life-style. For him, moving from one of his luxury residences to the White House and having to be president would be like moving down-market in housing and getting a full-time job. It would be a real bummer.

He is not into personal sacrifice. Donald Trump cares about political ideas the way I care about Olympic soccer matches. Donald Trump has no real personal political ideas or preferred policy agenda at all. He’s just a businessman, a total pragmatist.

Donald Trump is not your buddy and he is no kind of patriot. Trump likes money, tail, and Trump, period.

So we’re watching him campaign. He carelessly contradicts himself. He routinely takes one position and then the opposite one. He constantly offends rival candidates and significant potential voting blocs. He does exactly as he pleases, casually taking time away from campaigning, often spending no money, doing no advertising and no fund-raising. He behaves like a crazy person, defying convention, political correctness, and rather frequently ordinary good manners and civility as well. He says something embarrassing or outrageous several times a week.

One is obliged to conclude that either Donald Trump is crazy and the most incompetent candidate for office in human history, or he is motivated by something other than winning.

Since we know that Trump is a close friend of the Clintons, on the whole, I like best the theory that contends that Trump has really just been running, all along, in order to kill Republican chances in what ought to have been a landslide Republican year and to make possible the impossible: Hillary’s election.

He’s having lots of fun. He’s soaking up the limelight and laughing at all the dopes supporting him, while mischievously dropping another turd in the electoral punchbowl every now and then and watching the commentariat have fits over what they think is a gaffe.

Donald Trump is having huge personal laughs at the expense of all you oiks out there who are supporting him on the basis of total BS and he is enjoying himself even more playing the role of unruly Groucho to the Mainstream Media’s Margaret Dumont.

Trump is, in essence, the practical man of business who is casually kicking into a heap of rubbish the whole superstructure of American presidential politics, reducing all the theories, ideals, and PC taboos into useless impotent debris by sheer chutzpah.

All of this, I believe more and more as time goes by, is not a genuine political campaign at all, the Trump campaign is guerilla theater, an exercise in deliberate mockery and transgression, that has not only succeeding in bamboozling the American electorate and satirizing our political system on a fantastic scale. Trump has turned reality on its head, defeating all the real Republican candidates and usurping the GOP nomination for the presidency with pure comedy theater. Reality TV has defeated reality.

Trump has, in essence, demonstrated that energy, shameless aggression, and flamboyant pandering will, in America, triumph over ideas, serious policy, and decorum every time. H.L. Mencken is laughing cynically in Hell.

Yet, he obviously has not been doing all this just to prove that he can outdo the late Andy Warhol in art. There has got to have always been a substantive purpose there, and that purpose could only be one thing: electing Hillary. After the inauguration, just watch the multi-billion-dollar contracts for Infrastructure and new Federal housing start rolling Trump Enterprizes’ way.

Hillary is so scandal-beset that it is actually miraculous that she isn’t under indictment right now, and she is so unappealing as a candidate that I think it is only a matter of time before the Donald really will have to eat a hamster on live television to keep poor Hillary’s candidacy limping in the direction of the finish line. But you can count on him. If it takes eating a hamster to elect Hillary, that hamster is toast.

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Earlier Trump Faux-Candidacy commentary:

25 February — What If?

31 May — What Happens When the Dog Catches the Car?

04 August — Is Trump Deliberately Throwing the Election?

Gateway Pundit:

On July 8, 2016, 27 year-old Democratic staffer Seth Conrad Rich was murdered in Washington DC. The killer or killers took nothing from their victim, leaving behind his wallet, watch and phone.

Shortly after the killing, Redditors and social media users were pursuing a “lead” saying that Rich was en route to the FBI the morning of his murder, apparently intending to speak to special agents about an “ongoing court case” possibly involving the Clinton family.

Seth Rich’s father Joel told reporters, “If it was a robbery — it failed because he still has his watch, he still has his money — he still has his credit cards, still had his phone so it was a wasted effort except we lost a life.” …

On Tuesday Wikileaks offered a $20,000 reward for information on the murder of DNC staffer Seth rich.

Now this…
Julian Assange suggested on Tuesday that Seth Rich was a Wikileaks informant.

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Anti-Hillary Wikileaks DNC emails: 19,252 emails and 8,034 attachments from the top of the US Democratic National Committee. The leaks come from the accounts of seven key figures in the DNC: Communications Director Luis Miranda (10770 emails), National Finance Director Jordon Kaplan (3797 emails), Finance Chief of Staff Scott Comer (3095 emails), Finanace Director of Data & Strategic Initiatives Daniel Parrish (1472 emails), Finance Director Allen Zachary (1611 emails), Senior Advisor Andrew Wright (938 emails) and Northern California Finance Director Robert (Erik) Stowe (751 emails). The emails cover the period from January last year until 25 May this year.

Publius Tex argues that it would be awfully hard.

Trump has run for the presidency several times, only capturing a nomination because President Barack Obama paved his path via eight straight years of mendacity, dishonesty, verbal trickery, and deceit. Nothing means anything anymore, so it’s impossible to hold Trump to account for anything at all.

Hillary Clinton lost the nomination last time around to a smooth-talking rookie, despite her claim to be the Smartest Woman in the World. This time she struggled to put away an avowed Communist who possesses all the personal charm of a tapeworm.

Visually, both are terrible on TV. Trump has the worst hair ever. Hillary has the worst voice ever. He has permanent bed head. She sounds like a screech owl with hemorrhoids. …

Whichever one wins, a majority of the nation will despise them. And their voting base will be, at best, indifferent once the shine of victory wears off five minutes after inauguration.

Trump lets his mouth get so far ahead of his brain that he’s likely to troll his way into a war. Hillary Clinton beat him to that, though, with her insane intervention in Libya — an actual war that has created a terrorism Dante’s Inferno.

Trump is a serial philanderer who, until this current run for president, bragged about all the women he bedded while he was married. Hillary is the enabler of a serial philanderer and probable rapist who, when her cheating husband ran for and was president, ran operations on the taxpayer’s dime to destroy his mistresses and victims.

Trump is known for the “art of the deal,” an art that as often as not comes down to using bankruptcy laws to screw his partners and investors while he keeps getting paid. Hillary takes Mandarin opacity to glorious new extremes. From hiding subpoenaed law firm records to lying about why Americans died in Benghazi with their corpses behind her and their grieving families in front of her, she is a heartless ghoul and a cover-up artist without peer.

Trump gets himself into trouble by trolling the media and Hillary over her illegal email server and dangerous mishandling of classified information. But Hillary actually used the illegal server, with the obvious intent of skirting freedom of information laws so she could hide her doings and the operations of the Clinton criminal Foundation from the public — which might ask about all that — and the media, which we all know never, ever will.

Trump’s core argument for being president comes down to a string of absurdities. He’ll make Mexico pay for a wall to be built in the middle of a river, he’ll fix everything that’s bad (but don’t ask him for a plan!), and he’ll wipe out terrorists while being resolutely anti-war.

Hillary’s core argument comes down to “First Woman President Yay!” atop a party that now thinks gender is entirely fluid and not biological, and “competency!” which does not extend to how she actually performed in every job she has ever had, as she has always performed miserably. She was a lousy senator. She was a terrifying secretary of State. She would be a horrible president.

These are two awful people who could only beat each other. Their respective ascents are evidence that the nation has gone morally bankrupt. They are evidence that character does not matter.

But … could we do worse?

No. We could not.

Well, maybe if we pulled two convicts out of maximum security prison and nominated them. But convicted felons might have a contrition that lifelong scofflaws like Trump and Hillary will never know.

Otherwise, adjusting for the Kim Jong Un’s of the world … no, America. We could not do worse.

Read the whole thing.

Steve Hayward offers the first nine of a proposed Lutheran 95 Theses about the 2016 Election:

1) If Republicans had nominated one of their conventional candidates, that nominee would be running 10 points ahead of Hillary.

2) If Democrats had nominated someone plausible other than Hillary, that nominee would be leading Trump by 15 points or more. (Hillary is up almost 10 in the current polls.)

3) Republicans nominated the only candidate who could possibly lose to Hillary Clinton.

4) Democrats nominated the only person who could possibly lose to Donald Trump.

5) Is there any way Captain Kirk could reprogram our electoral computer to avoid this political Kobayashi-Maru Scenario? (Classical reference. . .)

Whole thing.

Hat tip to Bird Dog.

Let’s see, this week, Donald Trump continued his public attacks on the family of a Muslim US Army Captain killed while serving in Iraq.

Trump made it clear that he is uninterested in GOP unity by announcing specifically that he is not supporting Paul Ryan or John McCain.

Airing of the famous Daisy political commercial by Democrats was made redundant when some source within the Trump Campaign leaked to Joe Scarborough the unsettling information that Donald Trump asked an unidentified foreign policy expert engaged in advising him, three times, why the US could not use nuclear weapons. That one made headlines all day yesterday.

The same RNC bigwigs who suppressed opposition and rammed the Trump nomination through the Convention two weeks ago, this week, are reportedly panicking.

Reince Priebus is described as “very frustrated” and “stressed,” because he is “running out of excuses” to offer party bigwigs about Trump’s political incompetence and indifference to basic political norms. Republicans are panicking because Trump is frittering away a chance to defeat Hillary Clinton amid “self inflicted mistakes” and “missed opportunities.”

Trump is sinking in the polls. Even Fox News is giving Hillary a ten-point lead.

And it’s only the beginning of August. The boxcar-loads of opposition research the Dems and their media allies have been saving up are still just sitting there, waiting to be unloaded and fired.

We are faced with two possibilities: either Donald Trump is such a spoiled and totally-deranged sociopathic narcissist that he is out of touch with reality, unadvisable and uncontrollable, and his personal dementia is causing him to self-destruct in the course of the campaign, or the Clinton-Trump Conspiracy Theory, the hypothesis that Trump was put up to all this by Bill Clinton as a diabolically-clever, Hail-Mary-Pass strategy to sabotage the Republican Party’s nominating process and elect the hideously-unpopular Hillary in what-ought-to-have-been a Republican landslide victory year, is really true.

(NYM contemplated the Conspiracy theory as far back as February and found further evidence in May.)

There is no way to know the truth at present, but it’s going to be interesting to watch events unfold.

Either way, whether Donald Trump is simply so nutsy-cuckoo that he can’t help sabotaging himself, or whether he is throwing the election deliberately and intentionally, it is a sad commentary on all those loco-in-the-cabeza Trumpshirts out there that they have been themselves barking mad enough to pin their hopes and lend their support to a totally-unqualified, ethically-challenged, blowhard millionaire, who is dubiously Republican and obviously anything but a principled conservative. Don’t blame National Review or the Conservative Movement for electing Hillary, when it was you who rejected all the decent, rational, conservative, and qualified GOP candidates and went whoring after a Reality-TV Celebrity Clown with a big mouth and a handful of airy promises and crackpot policy positions.