How Trump can win: Russia's October Surprise

The surrealist in me still thinks that Donald Trump has a shot at winning the election. Yes, I know how ridiculous the idea now sounds, what with Paul Ryan predicting a Clinton win. (In truth, Ryan spoke provisionally, using the word "could" -- but his meaning is clear.)

Here's what bugs me. Trump seems to be losing -- you can practically see a scarlet L glowing on his forehead -- yet he is not rattled. He's still brimming with jackass self-assurance. He reminds of me of director Joseph L. Mankiewicz strutting around the set of Cleopatra, convinced that he's making a really good movie.

The Walking Cheeto is not acting like Adolf in the bunker, as immortalized in Downfall. The Walking Cheeto is not acting like Tricky Dick in his final days, boozily asking Kissinger to pray with him. No. To the contrary: In the midst of his meltdown, Trump smugly decided to campaign in Maine -- freakin' Maine, a state that never goes red. Either the man is truly insane or he knows something.

I have an idea as to what it is that he knows.

Remember when he started down the meltdown trail? The initial jaw-dropper wasn't his absurd reaction to the Khans. What stunned the nation was his call for Russia to release those fabled 30,000 deleted emails.

Of course Russia has those emails. Of course Russia will release something humiliating, even incriminating, at the worst possible time for Hillary. Of course Trump knows all about it.

Of course Putin and Trump are still working together.

The Republican candidate isn't flustered because he knows that he has four aces up his sleeve. The intelligence services of a major power are working clandestinely to place him in the oval office.

As longtime readers may recall, I once had a couple thousand emails go missing from my own account, back in 2008. I had stupidly opened an email attachment from someone claiming to be writer Evelyn Pringle, and my passwords were compromised. Soon thereafter, some 18 months' worth of emails vanished from my Yahoo email account. Obviously, someone had transferred those messages from web-based to POP3 -- which means that those messages came to rest on someone else's computer, at least for a while.

(Why would a hacker target me? At the time, I thought that it was all about the election. I later came to understand that something more mundane was afoot. That story is best told another time.)

So let's apply this lesson to Hillary's emails. I don't think that she (or any of her close associates) deleted them. In all likelihood, what happened to me also happened to her.

The preceding paragraph will be considered Thoughtcrime Most Foul by those infected with the virus of Clinton Derangement Syndrome. If you are the sort who views Hillary Clinton as a conspiratorial powerhouse -- if you consider it impossible for her to have been conspired against -- then you might as well not read further.

But if you can manage to open your mind even a little bit on that score, consider the following:

1. Hillary had a separate email system for classified information. She's a pro, and she was undeniably ambitious. Only a fool would call her sloppy.

2. The only "classified" bits of information (that we know about) on her private server were a few trifling items that never should have received a classification stamp. The worst example mentioned in the press had to do with congratulations sent to the newly-installed President of Malawi. In a word: Piffle.

3. Articles about the contents of the emails indicate that most of the messages had to do with forwarded internet articles -- things like that. More piffle. Of course, the communications with Blumenthal and Drumheller were not piffle, but neither were they classified, since both men were private citizens at the time. (I happen to admire both.)

4. Nobody has the time to go through tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands of messages, to look for specific items. On the other hand, a hacker is very likely to divert a huge chunk of emails all in one go. That way, the hacker has the messages on his personal system, and can search for certain strings at his leisure. (This is what happened to me. The same misfortune has hit many other people, of course.)

5. We know from various news articles (cited in previous posts) that the FBI managed to recover a number of the 30,000 missing emails. We don't know how many. However, we may fairly presume that the ones which the FBI recovered were benign. Were the situation otherwise, the Bureau would have said so, and Hillary would not be the Democratic candidate.

(The right-wing theory that Comey, a Republican, is acting on Hillary's behalf is a complete non-starter. If he were working for her, then there would now be no dispute between Hillary and the FBI.)

If I am correct in deducing that the recovered emails were benign, we may then fairly presume that I am also correct in my presumption that a hacker grabbed the lot of them willy-nilly, without knowing their contents.

6. It's also fair to presume that the hacker was Putin's hireling. (Guccifer, we now know, was a fall guy for Russian intel.)

All of which brings me to my major point:

The emails will read the way Vladimir Putin wants them to read.

You can easily guess what that means. For more, see here. (The link goes to a weird pro-Trump site which gives pretty much the same scenario, albeit from a very different POV.)

Moreover, the online discussion of this revelation will be dominated by Russia's notorious "troll house," which has already been the topic of much discussion. They will control the comments section of every single blog and news source that does not employ heavy-handed moderation. You think that the comments on Reddit and YouTube are bad now? You ain't seen nothin' yet.

The decades-long propaganda war against the Clintons assures that nothing Hillary says in her defense will be believed.

If the scenario outlined above has any validity, Trump cannot lose.

I don't care what he does. He can threaten to nuke Vatican City; he can have a romantic interlude with Roger Stone in the middle of Madison Square Garden; he can dance a jig at the base of the Statue of Liberty while wearing an orange diaper and screaming "I am the Antichrist!" Whatever inanity he gets up to simply will not matter.

He cannot lose.