Presidential front-runner Hillary Rodham Clinton announced Thursday that she is abandoning Democrats and returning to her conservative roots in a bid to save a Republican Party tossed into chaos by the mercurial rise of Reality TV Star Donald Trump.
The unprecedented political realignment means the longtime Democrat is switching sides less than six months before the November presidential election. Rodham Clinton, 68, said she decided to defect after a series of private meetings with House Speaker Paul Ryan (R-Wis.).
Rodham Clinton vowed to institute structural changes in the electoral system if she’s elected to limit the future influence of what she called the “lower classes.” The former U.S. Secretary of State said the shift is needed to insulate Wall Street and the 1 Percent from a worldwide populist upsurge, and to protect America from the prospect of a disastrous Trump presidency.
“This is not a decision I reached lightly,” Rodham Clinton said during an appearance with Ryan outside the Saudi Arabian Embassy in Washington, D.C. “There’s a difference between being right and doing right. As much as I love and respect the poor and middle class, we can’t allow these lower class people to call the shots for the planet’s only remaining superpower. And, by extension, the world.”
The shift represents a return to her conservative roots for Rodham Clinton, who campaigned for GOP hawk Barry Goldwater during the 1964 presidential election and led the Young Republicans Club at Wellesley College. The former First Lady grew up just 90 miles from Ryan, who called her defection “courageous.” Both were conservative, Midwestern, anti-communists in their youth.
It was unclear at press time whether former President Bill Clinton will be making a similar political conversion. He and Hillary Rodham have been married since 1975. They have one child.
An aide to former President Bill Clinton said he was unavailable for comment and taking some time to review his wife’s new alliance with Ryan, a former fitness trainer who is considerably younger at 46.
Ryan and Rodham Clinton held hands at times during their joint press conference as he compared her to anticommunist heroine Ayn Rand, an immigrant whose affluent family lost their wealth in the Russian Revolution. Rand, author of the novel Atlas Shrugged, opposed the concept of altruism.
Ryan opened the press conference by introducing Rodham Clinton as the next Republican president of the United States.
“Hillary appreciates the tremendous intellectual partnership we bring to the table when we work together,” Ryan said. “She’s a fine American who has been greatly under-appreciated by Democrats. It is my solemn honor to welcome her back to the Party of Lincoln.”
Trump decried the switch as “opportunistic and desperate,” ridiculing Ryan as a “political boy-toy” who meant to say “the Party of the Lincoln Log.” He said Rodham Clinton’s miraculous last-minute political conversion proves the American electoral system has been rigged by the two political machines.
“If Hillary could beat Bernie Sanders straight-up she wouldn’t be pulling this backroom garbage,” Trump said. “She hasn’t won a single state that wasn’t rigged in her favor by the same Democratic machine that changed the rules to bar independents from voting in the New York primary.”
The political shuffle comes amidst a presidential election which has seen Trump and fellow outsider Bernie Sanders challenge the preferred candidates of the respective Democratic and Republican political establishments. And do so in the middle of a worldwide populist backlash which has undermined established regimes in Libya, Ukraine, Egypt, Iceland, Greece, Tunisia, and Yemen and has challenged them in Syria, China, Saudi Arabia, Bahrain and the United States.
Rodham Clinton has been silent about alleged electoral abuses in New York, Arizona, Iowa, Kentucky and Nevada, where state Democratic machines have been accused of rigging election outcomes on her behalf. Often via rule changes to bar independent voters.
U.S. Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-Mass.) said the defection is actually good news for Democrat reformers, noting that Rodham Clinton has been seduced by the trappings of wealth and power in recent years. The former Harvard law professor is the leading voice for bank regulation in the U.S. Congress and hails from modest roots in Oklahoma, where she worked as a waitress in her youth.
Warren (above left) was named “The Sexiest Super Intelligent Woman Alive” by the Quadrennial Diplomacy and Development Review in 2015. The same State Department publication scorned Rodham Clinton as “country club trash” during her tenure as U.S. Secretary of State.
“Hillary’s behavior has become increasingly bizarre and even Nixonian in recent years,” Warren said. “Take the Princess Di royalty robe she wore to the 1998 White House Correspondents Dinner (right). Who dresses like that? No one I know – at least not in this plane of existence.
“Look, if Hillary can’t win the Democratic primary in a blue state like New York without help from the state machine, how can she possibly hope to achieve victory in a general election? Where independent voters play a pivotal role and cheating is more difficult.”
Political pollster Chris Ingraham of Florida said Rodham Clinton’s defection was triggered by the candidate’s fading popularity among the Dems’ 562 super-delegates – party loyalists who vote as they please.
Rodham Clinton had 1,768 pledged delegates to Sanders’ 1,494 when she decided to change sides, according to The Associated Press.
“It all comes down to winning for party insiders,” Ingraham said. “Super-delegates can read a poll and they can see that Hillary is losing independent voters because of the legalized bribes she and Bill took from banks in the guise of speaking fees. That kind of thing matters a lot less to Republicans than Dems.”
The Clintons “charged” the banks a staggering $200,000 per appearance – nearly four times the annual median U.S. household income. Hillary took in $675,000 alone from Goldman Sachs for three engagements between June and October of 2013 to earn “Political Hooker of the Year” honors for the third consecutive year from The Too Big to Fail Bank.
She and Bill have generated from monied interests via speaking fees since February 2001, according to CNN. They gave 729 speeches from February 2001 until May of this year, but have balked at sharing the transcripts of those speeches with voters.
House minority leader Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she had no idea what Rodham Clinton’s defection means for the remaining Democrats.
“This is an awful lot to digest for one morning,” Pelosi said during an impromptu telephone interview Thursday. “I don’t know whether Hillary’s defection makes Bernie Sanders our presidential candidate by default or not. We don’t even have a DNC head for me to discuss this with right now.”
That’s because Rodham Clinton did not jump ship alone.
The short list of other defectors is led by U.S. Rep. Debbie Wasserman Schultz (D-Fla.), reigning chairman of the Democratic National Committee; U.S. Sen. Chuck Schumer of New York; and U.S. Sen. Cory Booker of New Jersey. The three Wall Street allies announced that they would be making the jump with Clinton during a shared press conference at the U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
“I feel terrible about leaving my longtime friends in the Democratic machine, but this really isn’t that big a departure for any of us,” a tearful Wasserman-Schultz said (above left). “My husband is a real estate developer, Cory’s parents are IBM executives, and Chuck has been defending Wall Street for decades. We’re all country club people. None of us has ever gone to bed hungry and – to be blunt – we don’t want to.”
Schumer is widely viewed as the champion of Wall Street’s predatory investment banks, private equity funds and hedge funds. Groups which have enriched themselves by moving American factories to low wage nations at the cost of millions of American jobs.
“Sanders is against Wall Street,” Schumer said. “I’m not. In fact, they take pretty good care of me.”
Booker, the former mayor of Newark, New Jersey, established himself as Schumer’s heir apparent when he defended private equity firms in his role as a surrogate for President Barack Obama during the 2012 presidential election.
“We need to crack down on populist movements which threaten the status quo,” Booker said. “The three of us have reached the conclusion that we can do a better job of that as Republicans than we can as Democrats, now that our former party is gravitating backwards toward the controversial socialist politics of FDR.”
By switching her political allegiance, Rodham Clinton said she can save a Republican Party which is a more comfortable fit for her and her business allies. The move simultaneously clears the way for reformers within the Democratic Party who wish to move it to the left as social media erodes the ability of authoritarian governments to control their populations with propaganda.
“You might think social media and technology would make it easier for governments to oppress people in developed societies,” said Bill Gates, the billionaire cofounder of Microsoft. “However, the turbulent events of the past few years have shown us that’s just not the case. Dictators are falling and powerful business interest groups are being tossed aside as technology creates chaos in both the so-called Third World and the First World.
The switch shocked political insiders of both parties, instantly lifting the GOP’s political fortunes in the coming presidential race. The likelihood of Republicans wresting control of the White House improved to 2 to 1, from a prior 5 to 1, on the Paddy Power betting site within hours of the announcement.
The odds of independent Bernie Sanders winning the presidency also rose, surging from 33 to 1 to 3 to 1 in the space of a single afternoon as he became the likely Democratic nominee.
“I honestly don’t know what to say,” Sanders said. “Nothing like this has ever happened before in the history of the United States. It illustrates exactly what I’ve been saying about the corrupting influence of big money, which is out of the shadows now in a big way.”
The unprecedented last-minute change in political loyalties led to a surge in trading on global financial markets. The S&P 500 Index and the Dow Jones Industrial Index both posted double-digit gains for the day. Shares of the JP Morgan, Morgan Stanley, and Goldman Sachs investment banks enjoyed their biggest daily gains in more than a decade.
The Republican establishment welcomed its newest members.
“This is exactly the solution we’ve been looking for,” Republican National Committee Chairman Reince Priebus (above left) said in a prepared statement.
“Donald Trump polls well in red states, but he’s a disaster with independent voters,” the Roy Cohn clone added. “Not to mention our allies overseas.”
Republicans now face the prospect of a divided convention in which delegates will be free to change their support to whatever candidate they see fit, according to Ryan.
“We’ve tweaked the rules to give delegates the opportunity to adjust to Hillary’s new status as a Republican,” Ryan said, noting that polls indicate Rodham Clinton will handily win the upcoming GOP Convention in Cleveland.
The switch wasn’t entirely unexpected, according to Tom Donahue, head of the conservative U.S. Chamber of Commerce.
The Clintons have been frequent visitors to the annual gathering of monied interests in Davos, Switzerland. The World Economic Forum pioneered the rise of a global economy with no meaningful regulation, labor protections, or restrictions on insider trading.
“We’ve been talking with Hillary about a switch like this for several years,” Donahue said (right). “For all our outward differences, she and Bill have been pushing our policies all along. We’re aligned on everything but abortion and gay rights and those will no longer be issues for the new Republican Party moving forward.”
With Clinton at the helm, the GOP will not have to forge uncomfortable alliances with religious extremists and supremacist groups to reach 51 percent at the ballot box, Donahue said.
“It’s time to pull the plug on the crazies,” Donahue said. “Personally, I can’t wait. I’ve been waiting for this day for decades.”
Feminist icon Gloria Steinem, a member of the 1 Percent, applauded Clinton’s courage Thursday for finally trading in her aging boy-toy for a newer model. Media Magnate Oprah Winfrey, a longtime friend of both Clintons, was hospitalized with an apparent aneurysm after hearing the improbable news.
U.S. Rep. Augustus Scanners (R-Nev.) while participating in a panel at the conservative Heritage Foundation called “Hunting the Homeless: How to Bag Your Limit Every Time Out.” The graphic video of the fatal incident at left may not be suitable for younger viewers.
It was unclear at press time whether Ryan and Clinton’s new alliance is romantic as well as political. She was widely disparaged by some feminists for standing by Bill Clinton when his gubernatorial and presidential administrations were rocked by alleged sex scandals with Monica Lewinsky, Gennifer Flowers, Robert Paulson, Paula Jones, Juannita Broaddrick, Kathleen Willey, Caitlyn Jenner, world renown rollerballer Moonpie, Terry Schiavo, former Subway pitchman Jared Fogle, and The Energizer Bunny.
“This switch to Ryan and the Republican Party represents Hillary’s ‘inflamed sense of rejection,'” Steinem said, appropriating a line from the film “Fight Club” without attribution. “It is her inflamed bile duct. Her smirking revenge.”
Chelsea Clinton issued a cryptic statement immediately after the Saudi presser requesting “privacy and understanding” during this difficult “transitional period” for her family.
Both Ryan and the Koch Brothers lauded Rodham Clinton as a better presidential prospect than Republican front-runner Donald Trump in recent weeks. She habitually loses to the New York real estate developer in polls as a Democrat, but handily defeats both he and Sanders as a Republican.
Billionaire Charles Koch said the defection brings Rodham Clinton’s incredible political career full circle. The 80-year-old Kansas oilman said he first met her in 1966 at a gathering of the Kansas Republican Party. The 18-year-old woman had just joined the staff of the Fred Phelps Lawfirm as an unpaid intern. She was making her first appearance before the state’s GOP lawmakers when one of them asked her if she was a Republican.
“Yes sir,” Koch recalled her saying. “I’m whatever you need me to be.”
