One of the oldest tricks in the political playbook is pushing the narrative that your opponent has already lost the election. String together some polls, organize some op-ed pieces and do your best to convince your opponent’s supporters that they might as well stay home on Election Day.
It’s all over but the shouting.
If you want to see a classic demonstration of this technique in action, as orchestrated by a very large and very efficient political machine, turn on any network television program or take a look at any news site. You will see the Clinton campaign pushing the narrative that Donald Trump has "cratered," that there’s no way for him to recover and that, in effect, he’s lost the election.
Hillary Clinton is, for all intents and purposes, our next president already. Not so fast.
Donald Trump did not simply win the Republican nomination for president. He won the Republican nomination having received a record numbers of votes. In fact, he received 1.4 million more votes in the primary elections than any other Republican candidate for president ever has.
This was despite the fact that the vote was split among 17 separate candidates.
This did not happen by accident. It happened, because Trump tapped in to a very strong and very real current of anger and resentment in the United States. This anger and resentment is born of at least three causes.
First, the American people are deeply concerned about the state of the economy.
All manipulated figures and fantasy projections aside Americans know that the economy is in bad shape. Americans know that their standard of living is at best stagnant.
Americans know that they have to work longer and longer hours and work multiple jobs simply to maintain the status quo. Americans know that their children are graduating from high school and college and unable to find work at all.
Americans have been told for decades now that globalization and so called “free-trade” are working to their benefit. They know that that is not true. They see that a very small fraction of the population is fabulously wealthy and everyone else is scrambling to keep up.
They're tired of it. They're tired of the lies. They are demanding change.
Second, Americans are fed up with a broken immigration system and what amounts to an open border policy.
Resentment regarding illegal immigration was already high when Barack Obama took office in 2008. Since that time the president has effectively abandoned any pretense of attempting to control the flow of illegal immigrants into this country.
Deportations are down by over 60 percent since Obama took office. Illegals apprehended at the border are driven to bus stations and given taxpayer-funded tickets to continue their travel into the interior of the United States. Children of illegal immigrants are being flown at taxpayer expense directly from Central America into the U.S. to be reunited with their illegal parents who are here already.
Americans are fed up with it. They see the impact it is having on our ability to sustain social services. They see the impact it is having on wages. They see the impact it is having on crime. They are demanding that the law be enforced and the border secured.
Third, Americans are angry and frightened in regard to terrorism and national security.
Every year since Obama took office the threat has escalated and the situation has grown more dire. In France the authorities regard the threat from terrorist chemical attacks as so immediate that they have issued nerve gas antidote from military stocks to hospitals across the country.
In Britain military personnel have been advised it is unsafe to wear their uniforms in public on their home soil. Here at home we have seen a succession of ever worsening attacks and almost daily see the arrest of another ISIS operative plotting attacks.
Nothing that Hillary Clinton promises addresses any of these concerns. To the contrary, her explicit guarantee is that nothing will change when she gets to the White House. Her victory means four more years of the same policies and the same failures.
Hillary may wish the race was run. It is not. The deep reservoir of anger that powered Trump to victory in the primaries is still out there. This one is a long way from over.
Charles S. Faddis, retired CIA operations officer, led the first CIA team into Iraq (in 2002) and retired as head of CIA’s Counterterrorism WMD unit. He is a senior counterterrorism editor for Homeland Security Today and a contributor to EpicTimes.com, Andmagazine.com, Fox News, and OANN.com. He also is a former congressional candidate and consultant to the U.S. government on military/intel issues. He is the author of “Beyond Repair” (on the need for intel reform). Faddis is a U.S. Army veteran and former assistant attorney general. For more of his reports, Go Here Now.