A top political analyst for The Hill renews the conspiracy theory that Trump may be a Manchurian candidate that is controlled not by Putin, but by Hillary Clinton in a bid to rig the 2016 election.

Political analyst Brent Budowsky penned an article suggesting that Donald Trump is a secret operative of the Clinton campaign nearly one year to the date of alluding to the same possibility.

The latest piece, titled "Is Trump deliberately throwing the election to Clinton?" feeds into a narrative rampant on social media that points to Hillary’s longstanding friendship with the bombastic billionaire prior to the 2016 electoral season and reports that the former reality television star spoke with Bill Clinton on the phone the night before announcing his candidacy.

Although the piece presumably looks to discredit the Trump candidacy by arguing that the follies of the candidate are so historically great that the only explanation is that he is not actually even a candidate in the race, Budowsky does lay out the case for what many people think – that there is no way that this is for real.

A befuddled Budowsky asks: "If a candidate genuinely wants to become president, would he repeatedly insult the giant wave of Hispanic voters? Would he insult veterans who were heroic prisoners of war by saying that he 'likes people who weren’t captured?'"

These arguments are reasonable, but Trump’s recent activities are perhaps more telling of an attempt to sabotage his own candidacy between getting in a feud with the family of a war hero, making fun of the Book of Mormon to the degree that he may be the first Republican in the modern era to lose Utah, and celebrating the praise of North Korean dictator Kim Jong-Un.

Not all of Budowsky’s analysis is cogent, however. Particularly in his criticism of Trump’s policy of demanding that NATO allies pay their fair share and the real estate mogul’s call for Russia and the United States to join forces against Daesh in Syria, the analyst loses focus conflating non-interventionist foreign policy with being inherently "pro-Putin." In fact, the majority of Americans want greater cooperation with Russia according to polls while the same surveys suggest that US voters have a net negative view of Putin and Russia.

In looking at Trump’s policies in their totality, his positions on countering free trade to expand the Republican Party base and his insights on restructuring America’s foreign policy to focus on the threat of international terrorism suggest a very real and formidable candidate, but then he opens his mouth with a bizarre tirade leaving you to wonder if maybe – just maybe – Hillary has a hook into him.

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