Trump plant theory

The Trump plant theory is a conspiracy theory that originated during the United States presidential election, 2016, that claims Donald Trump was running for president of the United States to secretly aid Hillary Clinton's chances of being elected to the same office. The Tampa Bay Times described the idea as "outlandish" while Mother Jones jocularly declared it the "best conspiracy story ever" and Gawker opined it as "extremely delicious". Background: According to the theory, Donald Trump had made an arrangement with Hillary Clinton to secure the presidential nomination of the Republican Party with the intent of either dropping out of the race at some point, running an intentionally poor campaign, or (if not nominated by the Republican Party) running as a third-party candidate to siphon votes from the Republican nominee. The theory first gained public attention in a July 2015 blog post by Justin Raimondo. A tweet sent by Raimondo promoting the theory was subsequently re-tweeted more than 400 times, including by James Taranto. On April Fool's Day in 2016, a libertarian website created a manipulated image of a tweet appearing to originate from Trump's Twitter account that read, in part, "I ran for president to help Hillary win"; the image of the fake tweet was widely circulated. Later, in the wake of several July 2016 polls that showed Clinton would fare worse against Trump in a general election matchup than Democratic also-ran Bernie Sanders, Shane Ryan of Paste magazine satirically suggested an alternate version of the conspiracy theory by which Clinton was running a false flag campaign to elect Trump. Proponents of the theory pointed to the fact that Trump had a long history making positive comments about Clinton prior to entering the 2016 campaign, was formerly a member of the Democratic Party before becoming a Republican, and had donated money to Democratic candidates on a number of occasions. Noah Rothman of Commentary also opined that Trump tended to make bombastic or headline-grabbing statements at times that coincided "with scandalous revelations that reflect poorly on Democratic politicians". A separate report by The Washington Post, citing unnamed sources close to the Trumps and Clintons, alleged that Bill Clinton had telephoned Donald Trump the year before Trump announced his candidacy, encouraging him to take a larger role in Republican politics.