Hillary is plotting to win by dividing Republicans.

Daniel Greenfield, a Shillman Journalism Fellow at the Freedom Center, is a New York writer focusing on radical Islam.

Hillary Clinton has never won an honest election. And she isn’t about to start trying to win one now.

Her favorite kind of race is rigged. Deeply unpopular and deemed untrustworthy by huge numbers of voters, she plans to win by panicking Republicans into abandoning Trump to “save” themselves.

Hillary is an insider and her weapon of choice is the media. The weapon has a limited impact on the average Republican voter, but has a great deal of impact on the establishment Republicans who are her targets. Their weaknesses are position and respectability. From the very beginning some establishment Republicans preferred to see Hillary win to maintain the status quo.

For some that meant the policy status quo in which illegal alien amnesty, mass immigration, support for the Muslim Brotherhood and nation-building remained the deranged staples of GOP policy. For others it was about maintaining their privileged positions and access to power regardless of how badly they lost.

But a much larger wing of the party was uncertain about whether Trump could or should win. It was this demographic which Hillary’s people have been hammering with widespread coverage of defections by establishment types. The campaign’s goal has been to convince them that Trump is doomed and that his victory might even be more dangerous than a win for Hillary.

Hillary’s strategy is to split the Republican Party. Cut off the head from the body. Convince the establishment to starve Trump of resources while rallying Republican candidates to disavow him. Pit elements of the GOP against each other while Hillary cakewalks to victory and then inherits a conflicted and broken Republican Party incapable of presenting a coherent opposition to her agenda.

It’s a good plan. And only Republicans can let it happen.

Hillary Clinton did not want to face an actual opponent in the Democratic primaries. She does not want to face Donald Trump or anybody else with a national profile and name recognition in an election.

That’s what worked for her in New York. It’s the strategy she’s hoping will work for her one more time.

Trump plans to win by making inroads with parts of her white working class base sympathetic to his attacks on unfavorable trade agreements, political correctness and illegal immigration. Hillary is returning the favor by trying to make inroads with portions of his base that may not be willing to vote for her, but that can be convinced to see her as a lesser evil and Trump as the greater threat.

Hillary Clinton does not expect to win many Republican votes. The rollout of ex-Republican endorsements for her is more about dampening turnout than gaining new voters. It’s why Hillary has undergone yet another of her many transformations, going from preaching wealth redistribution to Bernie backers to dressing up in moderate drag and playing patriot. The aim is to convince GOP voters unhappy with Trump that the world wouldn’t end if they stayed home and she did become president.

But Hillary’s biggest campaign target is the infrastructure of the opposing party. The media whispering campaign aimed at convincing portions of the GOP establishment that Trump is doomed and that their hope lies with either ousting him or directing resources away from him is meant to pull the Republican Party into a civil war.

Either way Hillary wins.

Hillary doesn’t want a fair fight. Or even an unfair fight. She wants to cripple the GOP so it can’t fight at all. It’s the ultimate rigged election. And this is how Hillary Clinton intends to rig it.

She set a media trap using the fears and doubts of GOP elites against them. To win all she has to do is to convince them of what they already believe, that the party is doomed and that they have one last opportunity to cut and run. The media has announced loudly that, even though it is August, there is no possible way that Trump can win. Trial balloons have even flown in GOP media outlets proposing a negotiated surrender that will trade support for forbearance from President Hillary Clinton.

The name for this tactic is FUD. It stands for Fear, Uncertainty and Doubt.

Hillary accuses Trump of playing on fears, but she is the one running a campaign that is based around the fear factor. Unable to offer anything except the continuation of eight years of misery, LBJ in a pants suit is “Goldwatering” Trump by spreading fear about him. The more insecure voters in general and Republicans in particular feel about Trump, the more Hillary Clinton starts looking like a safer choice.

The GOP establishment, already swimming in its own molten pool of fear, uncertainty and doubt, is now being pushed into a full panic. It’s being told that its only choices are to throw the election to Hillary or be destroyed as a political party. This false message was crafted in the deepest bowels of the Clinton campaign. But it sounds a great deal like the dark thoughts that the establishment was already thinking.

And under the influence of those dark thoughts and despair, it has been missing the bigger picture.

Hillary Clinton isn’t the confident candidate coasting to victory that her media allies portray her as. She’s a weak and struggling candidate who has no confidence in being able to win an honest election.

Her latest scandal isn’t about her emails, but how her political allies in the DNC rigged the system to favor her because she was afraid that she couldn’t win even against an incoherent socialist like Bernie Sanders with all the appeal of a soggy pool of spoiled milk. If anyone has reason to fear, it’s Hillary.

The truth is the opposite of what we are seeing in the media.

The media roars that the Republicans are a divided party saddled with an unpopular candidate. The truth is that the Democrats are a divided party saddled with an unpopular candidate.

Hillary Clinton is running for Obama’s third term while lacking any of his appeal. Or any appeal at all. On top of that she has a genius for generating scandals and then making them worse with denials and lies. Just getting this far tore her party apart. And now she has to make the case to the country that she couldn’t even successfully make to her own party without rigging the system. Her only approach is to play it safe and paint her opponents, whether it’s Sanders or Trump, as dangerous radicals.

Does that sound like a confident candidate ready for a national election?

And yet too many Republicans have come to believe that Hillary Clinton’s victory is inevitable. Why?

The answer takes us back to Pauline Kael’s legendary remark about Nixon. “I live in a rather special world. I only know one person who voted for Nixon. Where they are I don’t know. They’re outside my ken.”

Many establishment Republicans live in that same special world. They don’t know anyone who voted for Trump. They can’t imagine why anyone would. His rise took them by surprise and they are all too willing to believe that nobody would vote for him in a national election. Their liberal friends certainly wouldn’t.

They are far more attuned to the editorial pages of the New York Times and the Washington Post than to actual voters. That is why Hillary’s media barrage has staggered them so badly. They know how biased the media is. But they still get their sense of reality from its smeared pages.

Hillary Clinton has spent enough time around Beltway Republicans to know how disconnected they feel from their own voters. And one of her closest advisers is David Brock who began working the right side of the street before switching over to the left. Hillary and her people know how vulnerable she is. So they are trying to sideline an actual election by exploiting Republican vulnerabilities instead.

If they can trigger a Republican abandonment of Trump, then Hillary wins. Even if all they do is set off a civil war, every ounce of energy directed toward infighting instead of a national campaign helps her win.

Hillary Clinton doesn’t believe she can win a fair election. The game has been rigged in all the familiar ways, from media bias to voter fraud, but only Republican defeatism can hand her the White House.