As a new CBS News poll shows Donald Trump with the highest level of support so far in the presidential race, Jeb Bush has expressed concerns that Trump may be in cahoots with Hillary Clinton to help her win the presidency.
In a tweet earlier this week, Bush suggested Trump could be part of a conspiracy to help the former secretary of state get into the White House.
“Maybe Donald negotiated a deal with his buddy @HillaryClinton. Continuing this path will put her in the White House,” Bush tweeted.
The tweet came in response to a remark by Trump on Twitter: “A new poll indicates that 68% of my supporters would vote for me if I departed the GOP & ran as an independent,” Trump wrote.
The remark also followed Trump’s call for a ban on Muslim immigration into the United States.
The theory isn’t new. Weekly Standard Editor Bill Kristol, and others, have opined on whether Trump could be a “double agent” working to help ensure Clinton, who leads Trump in nearly all match-up polls next year, gets elected.
Last month, the top strategist for Ohio Gov. John Kasich’s presidential campaign asked whether Trump was “highly secret tool created by the Clinton campaign.”
The first to suggest this theory was blogger J.K. Trotter in July. Trotter asked whether Trump’s entry into the race was a “Democratic wrecking operation.”
“It sounds like something from ‘House of Cards’: Politician A enters into a secret alliance with Politician B—a loose-tongued rival from another party with the chutzpah, the cash and the power to play the spoiler—to ensure Politician A’s election,” wrote Justin Wm. Moyer in The Washington Post.
Whether there is any truth to the claim, or if it’s merely the usual political shenanigans that occur in every presidential race, is the question.
In terms of the purported evidence, the critics say Trump used to be a Democrat—though politicians often change parties and President Ronald Reagan was a Democrat until 1962.
Further, Bill and Hillary Clinton attended Trump’s wedding in 2005 to Melania Trump in Florida, and Trump and Bill have enjoyed golfing together.
“I happened to be planning to be in Florida, and I thought it would be fun to go to his wedding because it is always entertaining,” Hillary Clinton said. “Now that he is running for president, it is a little more troubling. I didn’t know him that well.”
Also, Trump has donated to the Clinton Foundation and then there is the “mysterious Trump-Clinton phone call” just weeks before Trump declared his candidacy.
“The tone of the call was informal, and Clinton never urged Trump to run, the four people said,” Robert Costa and Anne Gearan reported, summarizing the comments of “four Trump allies.” “Rather, they said, Clinton sounded curious about Trump’s moves toward a presidential bid and told Trump that he was striking a chord with frustrated conservatives and was a rising force on the right.”
Given this trail of evidence, as circumstantial as it may be, the matter of whether Bush is really onto something remains to be seen.
“Donald Trump is a false-flag candidate,” conservative blogger Justin Raimondo wrote. “It’s all an act, one that benefits his friend Hillary Clinton and the Democratic party that, until recently, counted the reality show star among its adherents. Indeed, Trump’s pronouncements—the open racism, the demagogic appeals, the faux-populist rhetoric—sound like something out of a Democratic political consultant’s imagination, a caricature of conservatism as performed by a master actor.”
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