Wikileaks has an plan for a more modest version of the con you're picturing.
on itself similar to what happened to Mitt Romney in 2012. The variety of candidates is a positive here, and many of the lesser known can serve as a cudgel to move the more established candidates further to the right. In this scenario, we don’t want to marginalize the more extreme candidates, but make them more “Pied Piper” candidates who actually represent the mainstream of the Republican Party. Pied Piper candidates include, but aren’t limited to: • Ted Cruz • Donald Trump • Ben CarsonThe first is to use the field as a whole to inflict damage
While I can see where you're coming from, I can't shake the feeling that you've crossed the line into tin foil hat territory. I'm halfway through the Frontline episode (got myself a year of VPN, so if you have more good content, lemme know). What I've gained from it already is that I can now see why Trump is the way he is and how Clinton will bend herself to get what she wants...I think I can see the dots that you use to draw your conclusion. But I'm not convinced that Clinton, or the people in her vicinity, had this anomaly of a presidential election in their heads. I feel like I need to make too many assertions about Clinton/DNC's forecasting ability, the GOP's inadequacy, the media's cooperation... How does, for example, Bernie play into this? To what degree do you think the way this worked out was planned vs. that she got very lucky?
To be clear, I suspect that Clinton et. al. saw nothing but upside from goading Trump into running, and once they were pleasantly surprised by the amount of upside, they doubled down. I'll even go as far as hypothesizing that they foresaw the Trump/Breitbart angle, especially once he went on muthafuckin' Infowars. /r/The_donald, and his AMA there, pretty much illustrated that he was a highly manipulable patsy who could be made to run like a bull at a red cape. I'm not saying they foresaw this outcome in its entirety, but I am saying that it is one of many outcomes within the probability fan (and probably more dramatic than they expected). I'll give you tinfoil hat, though. What the fuck was that shimmy during the first debate? I mean, the Alicia Machado salvo was loaded and armed and ready to fire. Was that some weird signaling shit or something? ;-)
If you read the first letters of each word in his speech, it spells MAGAlomaniac! I wouldn't be surprised to learn that the DNC camp has better strategists who came to the same conclusion, or at least saw it as a probability / opportunity. Trump, despite his odd characteristics, is surprisingly predictable. What I find unlikely is that this goes back any further than, say, early 2015. (Shockingly, Trump's announcement to run for president was in June 2015. Holy hell, has it really been that long?) Especially your suggestion that she orchestrated the correspondent's dinner touchdown is just too much of a stretch for me.
My perspective: There was zero to lose by trying the gambit. I mean, goading Donald Trump generally results in a lawsuit at worst, and suing the president for slander is exactly the sort of thing that would make Trump effectively go away forever. There was plenty to gain: if you can get him to charge, it will be entirely on the Republicans to stop the stampede. So the costs-benefits analysis is this: do you let the press writers to write a few throwaway jabs about Trump and birtherism? Or do you make a few phone calls, say "hey, I've got an idea" and then get those same writers to really get under his skin? The only remaining question is whether you think Hillary Clinton is playing that many moves ahead. I would argue that you're stupid if you think she isn't. I'm not betting that this was a known outcome that she was banking on; I'm betting that this is a possibility that she's been cultivating into a probability.
The Clintons have been working the angles in full view of the public for decades. Donald Trump is used to back-office deals, and posing for cameras. Hillary Clinton is already putting chess pieces onto a board that Donald Trump doesn't even see yet, because he's still focusing about that bishop that just took his pawn in move 5 on this chessboard.