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Why is The Hill publishing crazy conspiracy theories by Trump associate Roger Stone?

Ben Jackson/Getty Images

This new op-ed piece by the longtime Republican trickster weaves a conspiracy that the entire election will be rigged to stop Donald Trump, from rigged voting machines to rigged opinion polls that are meant to fool the public into thinking that a predetermined victor will have won legitimately. While it reads like it was originally etched on a piece of tin foil, the most interesting aspect is that the real target of Stone’s conspiracy-mongering turns out to be other Republicans, notably RNC Chairman Reince Priebus. He even declares that Governor Scott Walker’s celebrated recall victory in Wisconsin was fraudulent!

Nowhere in the country has this been more true than Wisconsin, where there are strong indications that Scott Walker and the Reince Priebus machine rigged as many as five elections including the defeat of a Walker recall election.

Stone then sets out to prove that the Priebus-Walker machine also stole the Wisconsin primary for Ted Cruz, saying that Trump 20-point shift in the state’s respected Marquette University poll was the product of a conspiracy to pave the way for the forged result:

Shifts like that don’t happen over brief intervals of time, absent a nuclear explosion. It didn’t make any sense — unless you knew what was going on was an “instant replay” of Walker’s victories. The machine Priebus built was delivering for Cruz big time.

In fact, looking at those actual polls between February and March, it is clear that Trump’s support stayed constant at around 30 percent, while opposition to Trump coalesced around Cruz after Marco Rubio dropped out. Cruz then won the primary 48 percent to 35 percent.

After changing the subject back to Hillary Clinton, Stone ironically says in his conclusion: “We are now living in a fake reality of constructed data and phony polls.” As a data point in the Republican refusal to view Democratic victories as legitimate, this is an odd one—refusing to recognize rival GOP victories as legitimate.