• by Joe Mandese  @mp_joemandese, December 8, 2015

If you ask me, it’s the only plausible scenario to explain Donald Trump’s behavior.

Here’s how it goes: Trump is consciously perpetrating an elaborate farce because he believes it is the only way to expose and reform what has happened to our political-industrial system, especially the one connected to the media industry.

Trump will continue to push the boundaries as far as the media, the “polls,” and well, the rest of us will tolerate for one sole purpose: to demonstrate exactly how broken we’ve become.

Just this morning, I can imagine Trump looking in the mirror and and speaking to himself, saying, “I can’t believe they’re buying into that brownshirt rhetoric. How far can I stretch things today?”

The way this scenario plays out, Trump keeps turning it up until either people come to their senses, or he exposes the whole act at some carefully timed point -- either while accepting the GOP nomination during the national convention, or even better, on the morning of Election Day, when he finally reveals, “It was just a joke. I didn’t think anyone would take it this seriously, or take it this far. I just did it to prove a point. I am stepping down from this race. America, I’m firing myself.”

This is where the scenario gets really interesting, because after Trump exposes his Presidential bid as really just a reality TV hoax, Americans end up admiring him so much that they draft him anyway. Americans from all sides of the political spectrum simply write him in and he wins by a landslide, and he ends up going down in history as the President who finally reformed our political-industrial complex, got the populace to begin taking the issues seriously, and most importantly of all, got us to put the political media scene into perspective, making it less about the personalities and more about what those persons say they’ll do -- and what they actually do.

In that scenario, Donald Trump will be remembered as the President who ended not just the political-media-industrial complex, but our obsession with reality TV personas. Much like how we remember Richard Nixon for ending the Vietnam War, Ronald Reagan for ending the Cold War, and George W. Bush for ending the War on Terrorism.