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Comment by 75j | Hacker News Reader

Yep. Trump is a monster, but this feels sort of good knowing how Clinton and her supporters acted. If only people could have seen the light about the Clintons a year ago, then maybe there would've been better choices today.

And remember! The blame for a Trump presidency lies with none other than Hillary Clinton. She's the one that cheated a popular opponent in the primaries, that strategized to promote Trump during the Republican debates, that infiltrated the media and turned journalists into self-admitted "hacks", and she's the one that interjected herself into the presidential race despite knowing that her "scandals" -- electoral corruption, mishandling of classified information, pay-for-play at the Clinton foundation, Bill's history of child rape, etc. -- all disqualify her as a viable opponent to Trump.

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Well, to be Machiavellian for a minute, Trump is the only candidate that Clinton has a prayer against. The other Republicans consistently outperform Trump in the polls. On the other hand, this has been a bad year for pollsters.

If she really believed in her causes and not her career, she could have decided not to run and backed a promising successor a long time ago.

Thanks to Wikileaks, we know that the Democrats wanted to ensure that the Republicans would nominate someone more extreme. Look at the PDF attachment here. There's more than just this quote, too:

Operationalizing the Strategy Pied Piper Candidates

There are two ways to approach the strategies mentioned above. The first is to use the field as a whole to inflict damage on itself similar to what happened to Mitt Romney in 2012. The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more “Pied Piper” candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party. Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to:

• Ted Cruz

• Donald Trump

• Ben Carson

https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/1120 (Read the PDF attached)

Is there anyone else that could have secured a majority in the House and potentially (as of 1247am EST) the Senate? I doubt that, DC politics is more about trading wins like potheads passing the joint around. I don't mean that pejoratively but literally -- Republicans and Democrats trade wins and losses to curry favor with one-another, meanwhile the interests of the American people are secondary to this political snobbery.

Furthermore, who else could have rallied the masses to vote so thoroughly? A Jeb vs Hillary election would have been very dull, almost depressingly so, meanwhile a Cruz vs Hillary election would have bordered on hopelessly disinteresting.

It sounds like you want to cut off your nose to spite your face.

How so? I'm not excited about a Trump presidency.

My hopes are that 1) the media will keep a better eye on Trump (going off the last 8 years, they'll ignore any atrocity as long as it's committed by the blue team), 2) that Trump is not as smart as Clinton, and therefore less able to deceptively achieve his goals and 3) that 4 years of Trump will mobilize Americans to fix their electoral system and seek out real alternatives to the Democrat / Republican duopoly.

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