In this Google Trends graph, we see the interest in a group of related searches about Trump throwing the election over the last five years. (Please note that the graph is zoomed out to the last five years because Google Trends allows only graphs of five years, one year, and smaller increments and the “Is Trump a plant?” story has been on the radar for about the last 18 months.)

At various junctures during the last 18 months running up to the 2016 election, there was a meme that cropped up in the mainstream press that Donald Trump was a double agent who was running as a plant on behalf of the Clintons. This notion was certainly batted around on social media and Reddit and even in the dark and ominous alternative media online with its perceived conspiracy bent. The theory that Trump, having fallen under the spell of Bill Clinton’s considerable charm and persuasiveness, decided to go along with a plan that would make Machiavelli blanch and run as a saboteur to the Republican party who would throw the election on purpose so that Hillary could coast into the highest office is, if we are being fair, not so different from something like Pizzagate where various pundits kick around theories of the criminality of the power elites who run American based on constellations of circumstantial evidence.

Using Google Trends to explore when this “Is Trump a plant?” and related search terms were first in the aether, we see the first murmurings of this in early July 2015 and the first notable peak of interest in mid-August 2015. This first peak in interest coincides with the publishing of an column by Brent Budowsky on thehill.com on August 6th, 2015. The column marshals the following evidence for this theory: Bill Clinton and Donald Trump had a conversation shortly before Trump declared his candidacy for president; Trump donated money to the Clinton Foundation; Trump was a supporter of Hillary in 2008 and said nice things about her during that campaign; Trump has at various points in the past said good things about countries with single-payer healthcare systems like Canada and Scotland; and finally Trump has in the past donated money to the campaigns of prominent Democrats. Budowsky also brings up the specter of Trump being a modern day H. Ross Perot who might run as a third party candidate and siphon votes from the Republican candidate.

Just over a year later on August 12th, 2016, Budowsky wrote another column called “Is Trump deliberately throwing the election to Clinton” that again raised the possibility that Trump was a plant but this time much more seriously. Budowsky was reacting at that time as many especially on the left were to a number of self-inflicted controversies that Trump had embroiled himself in including his criticism of a Gold Star father , his repeated insults of Hispanic people and most especially Mexicans, Trump’s slam of John McCain, Trump’s praise for Putin, Trump’s praise for Kim Jong Un, Trump mocking a disabled reporter and then denying it, or innumerable other dust-ups that I have failed to mention.

Budowsky references his column of a year before in his August 2016 column questioning if Trump might be a plant and calls his previous conspiracy-theorizing in August of 2015 on the subject tongue-in-cheek. But in the August 2016 column Budowsky strikes a much more serious tone:

A year after my tongue-in-cheek column asking whether Trump is running as a plant to elect Hillary Clinton, I will now raise the possibility, much more seriously, that one way to explain Trump’s repeatedly self-destructive behavior could be that deep down Trump does not want to win the election and is clumsily throwing the game. “I am not stating that I believe that Trump wants to lose to Clinton, but I am suggesting there is at least some possibility that this is the case.”

So it stands to reason that as Budowsky and others in the media class began curating their collections of Trump fuck-ups in early-to-mid August of 2016 and the largest spike by far in the Google trends graph we looked at in the beginning of this piece comes in that same period in early-to-mid August 2016 when the topic was at 80% of its peak saturation. The final, highest peak in the graph comes a couple of months later in 2016 in early-to-mid October around the time of the release of the Access Hollywood “grab them by the pussy” tape on October 7th, 2016. A related series of articles in the mainstream press were circulated again around the same times in early-to-mid August and October speculating about whether Trump might drop out of the race.

By November 8th, 2016, apparently a tsunami of change had driven across the political landscape and Trump won the election.

Now, here we are some six weeks after the election, and the media class and the Democratic Party are both still reeling. Just a few months ago mainstream news sources were seriously speculating about if Trump would drop out of the election altogether or if he was a double agent who was throwing the race. Now the public is supposed become swept up in the great furor these same outlets are raising about whether or not Russia hacked the election.

What if I suggested to you that maybe instead of Russia being crucial in this election cycle, the strings were really pulled by one Hillary Rodham Clinton? After all, the evidence that exists supporting the assertion that the Democrats rigged the Primary against Bernie Sanders and for the Notorious HRC is much more substantial than evidence of Russia having any decisive role in the election. And can anyone honestly say at this point that Bernie would’ve done worse than Hillary against Trump? If anyone changed the course of this election in an underhanded way, it was the power elite of the Democratic party and those in Hillary’s camp. The Wikileaks emails bear testament to this.

So the same mainstream liberal press that is currently promoting the Russia hacking meme was also promoting the “Trump is a plant for Hillary” meme and I think in both instances these were nothing more than self-serving media plays that were engineered by the establishment Democrats. Because of the amazing resource that is Wikileaks the complicity of much of the mainstream press with the agenda of the Democratic Party is plain for anyone with a computer and an internet connection to see.

Feel free to go ahead and plunk “Brent Budowsky”, the long-time liberal hack who penned those articles about Trump being a plant in August of 2015 and 2016, into the Wikileaks search bar for Hillary campaign chair and Pizzagate target John Podesta’s leaked emails. What will immediately become clear to the reader reviewing the correspondence contained in the Wikileaks emails between Budowsky and Podesta is that Budowsky was in essence a party flack who published glowing column after column about Hillary and was always careful to check with Podesta about whether the content of his columns were OK with the powers that be at the Hillary campaign.