Rumor has it Donald Trump may be dropping out of the Presidential race.

We’ve heard these speculations before, but after kicking a crying baby out of one of his rallies, even his staunchest supporters are scratching their heads.

Does this guy even want to be President of the United States?

Only a few weeks ago a story was circulating that Donald Jr. was calling up potential Republican running mates asking if they wanted to run both domestic and foreign policy while his dad handled “Making America Great Again.”

From the very beginning of this unlikely Presidential run, people have questioned all kinds of things about the Trump campaign – chief among them was this: Is he serious!?

Donald Trump is the Republican standard bearer – Isn’t he more of a Democrat? Isn’t he actually friends with his supposed Democratic challenger, Hillary Clinton? Didn’t he actually donate money to her first Presidential bid in 2008? Is he just a false flag for Clinton – someone so odious he’ll rally people to vote FOR HER rather than for him?

The Clinton fear machine has us all convinced that the second he gets into office he’ll be launching nukes, rounding up undesirables and opening concentration camps.

I have no idea whether this will actually come to pass. Win the nomination and then drop out? Anything is possible when you’re running a reality TV star for the highest office in the land. But it begs the question – what happens if he really does it? What happens if Trump drops out?

Certainly the Republicans will find SOMEONE to run in his stead. Maybe it will be his running mate, Mike Pence. Maybe the party elders will pick one of the usual suspects – Paul Ryan, Mitt Romney or Jeb Bush.

But in such a situation, what happens to the Democratic nominee?

Hillary Clinton is not popular on her own.

Her Presidential crusade is built on one thing: she’s not Trump.

For the most part, she isn’t running on what she’d do as commander in chief. Sure, she’s pulled out a bunch of progressive platitudes mostly cribbed from the Bernie Sanders campaign. But no one with any memory of the Clintons actually expects her to abide by them. If you don’t think the first thing she’ll do in office is approve the TPP, I’ve got a bridge to sell you in Brooklyn.

Hillary Clinton will say what she has to say to get elected. If you doubt that, please recall that when she went on one of the most popular black radio programs, they asked her what’s one thing she always keeps in her purse. She said, “Hot Sauce!” They incredulously asked if she was just saying that to get black votes, and she jokingly asked, “Is it working?”

Without Trump, why would anyone vote for Hillary Clinton?

She needs him to get elected. She needs the fire and brimstone of his campaign. She needs to be able to point to him and portray how terrible a Trump Presidency would be.

For example, take the Hitler analogies.

During the primaries, pundits cautiously feared breaking Godwin’s Law when it came to Trump. Sure, he has certain similarities with the National Socialist German Workers Party candidate of yore, but few were willing to conflate the two.

Now that Trump has miraculously earned his party’s unequivocal nomination, the gloves are off. Talking heads across the nation equate Trump and Hitler as if it were somehow axiomatic. And, yes, Trump is racist, sexist, xenophobic, etc. He feeds off these qualities in others. He uses them to propel his campaign. But he doesn’t have control of the military like the Nazis did in Germany – they hate him. He doesn’t have the groundwork of a party explicitly founded on the theory of racial purity. He hasn’t weakened the entire political system to the degree that it is willing to bow down before him and do whatever he wants.

A president, even a Trump president, can’t do whatever he likes. There are checks and balances. But the Clinton fear machine has us all convinced that the second he gets into office he’ll be launching nukes, rounding up undesirables and opening concentration camps.

Make no mistake – Trump would clearly be a terrible President. I do not dispute it. Very few people do. But the force of Clinton’s candidacy is based on Trump’s existence. Her campaign has talked up how he would bring forth a combination of the Holocaust and Armageddon. Without him in the game, the voting public loses it’s best reason to come to the polls for her.

She’s a war hawk. As President, her husband with her full support increased the prison industrial complex more than any other chief executive in history. She’s in favor of public school privatization, endless standardized testing and Common Core. She supports the same Wall Street friendly policies that helped crash the economy and evaporated jobs.

But she’s not Donald Trump.

If the Republicans put forth a milquetoast candidate, who’s to say if he’ll get much support from the base. The Trump faithful will still vote for the Donald, whether he’s officially on the ballot or not. The GOP vote would be fractured between Trump and Republican No. 2. And it’s hard to say who Independents, who make up the largest voting block in the country, will support. More likely than not, they’ll do what the usually do – stay home.

Unless…

Independents strongly favored Clinton’s Democratic challenger Bernie Sanders in the primaries. If Trump drops out, it provides an opening for a true progressive third party candidate, someone to get the Independents to the polls.

The only thing stopping some people from voting third party now is fear of Trump. They can’t accept letting him win. But if Clinton has no robust Republican challenger, it frees former Bernie supporters to back someone like Green Party candidate Jill Stein.

Stein is Bernie on steroids. She wants to boost the economy by forgiving all student debt. She wants single payer healthcare. She wants a Green New Deal – to reduce the size of the military while investing in environmentally friendly jobs at home. She’s against public school privatization, testing and Common Core. She makes Hillary Clinton look… well, like Donald Trump.

But she has a hard road ahead of her. She may not be on every state ballot. Not sinceGeorge Washington has a third party candidate won the Presidency. Even Ralph Nader – who is erroneously blamed for turning the 2000 election in favor of George W. Bush – didn’t get enough votes to win a single district or electoral vote.

But in the political chaos following a Trump flame out, a chance opens up. Everything would be up for grabs.

Why vote for a neoliberal like Clinton without the fear of a neofascist like Trump? If too few people vote for a third party, Clinton wins. Nothing lost there. Meanwhile, it’s doubtful Republicans could pull off a victory without independents. But if Independents and almost half of the Democrats who voted for Bernie pull together behind Stein, there is a real chance of victory.

So keep your eyes on the flaming zeppelin that is the Trump campaign. The one person with more at stake than The Donald is Hillary Clinton.

Steve Singer

Gadfly on the Wall