by William Skink

After the “Obama is the founder of ISIS” bullshit Trump deployed to once again capture the media attention for the next few cycles, I’m more convinced than ever of Trump’s trojan horse function to actually benefit the Clinton campaign.

While Trump is now claiming he was being sarcastic, his insistence that he was being literal after the firestorm erupted, and not figurative, ensured that incredulous media outlets would carefully dissect his every iteration of this latest absurdity.

How this benefits the Clinton campaign is obvious. Trump could have hit Hillary hard on the new emails exposing how Clinton Foundation donors called in favors while Clinton ran the State Department, but he didn’t. Instead his remarks dominated news coverage, eclipsing the growing body of evidence that Hillary Clinton is a corrupt peddler of political influence unfit for the presidency.

There is also the added benefit of any topic that gets the Trump treatment becomes too toxic to approach, even though the topics need to be examined.

For example, let’s take a look at Trump’s claim that the vote count will be rigged. Here is how specifically Trump states it could happen:

Trump specifically told the Washington Post this week that he thinks rigging will take the form of voter identification fraud. But, as Hasen told NPR this week, the kind of fraud that voter ID laws are intended to counter just doesn’t seem to exist.

That quote comes from this NPR article. If you read the entire article, there is one election result conspicuously missing from the article: the 2004 reelection of George W. Bush. There is very good evidence that the Ohio results were hacked for Bush, but lucky for Bush (and Karl Rove) the guy who could have provided insight into this voter theft, Michael Connell, conveniently died in a plane crash before his deposition.

But Trump isn’t talking about voting machines, where the real threat of stolen elections exist. Why not?

Then there are the questions surrounding Hillary Clinton’s health. I think this is a real area of concern (better start investigating just who Tim Kaine is), but let’s see how Trump is framing this issue:

“She goes out and she sees you guys for about 10 minutes, she sees you for a little while, it’s all rehearsed and staged,” Trump said in an interview broadcast Sunday on Fox News’s “Media Buzz.”

“They’ll pick a couple of people out of the audience that are like, you know, 100 percent. She’ll sit around a little plastic table, they’ll talk to the people for a while. It’s ridiculous,” he added.

“And then she goes away for five or six days and you don’t see her. She goes to sleep.”

So Hillary sleeps? That’s the dig Trump is going to take? Hillary is no spring chicken, so it’s doubtful this line of attack is going to do much. Trump is trying to question her stamina, for sure, but there are much more substantive concerns regarding potential blood clots and other health issues that Trump isn’t using. Instead it’s excessive napping Trump is choosing to focus on.

Going back to the Obama as founder (and Hillary as co-founder) of ISIS comment, this one really pisses me off because the whole argument here is Obama abandoned Iraq (thanks to Bush’s Status of Forces Agreement) and Hillary destroyed Libya, creating the vacuums that ISIS emerged from. While there is a little truth to this assertion, there is a much more sordid tale to be told.

But Trump isn’t going to go there. No, he won’t talk about the other founders of ISIS, like Saudi Arabia, or the support provided to terrorists by Israel, or the complicity of Turkey in facilitating ISIS and other terrorist groups to make millions selling oil on the black market. Trump won’t question why it took Russia providing satellite evidence of ISIS transporting oil to shame Obama into finally ordering airstrikes.

From the beginning, since that phone call from Bill encouraging him to run, Trump has done more damage to the GOP than to the Clinton campaign. It’s gotten so bad that now there is speculation that down-ticket races are being hurt by Trump’s continued attempts to self-destruct his campaign. How convenient for Hillary Clinton.