The minor parties in the US are pretend parties for pretend candidates

What to watch at CNN's Libertarian town hall

People who know perfectly well from the outset of their campaigns all the way to the end that the chance of them actually getting to the Oval Office is effectively nil are pretend candidates, running at the top of the pretend tickets of pretend parties.

Since everybody knows the whole thing is a costume party, a tongue-in-cheek, Halloween, or a Star Trek convention, nobody cares and everyone knows it is utterly irrelevant to ask whether the candidates are in the least ready for the job.

Any jackass who can bray can run, no foul/no harm, and a good laugh is had by all.

But the minor parties do have one serious function in the American system, giving voters totally alienated from or enraged at "the system" a way to lodge a recognizable protest vote that signals, by their choice of pretend party or candidate, what sort of America they would rather have than the one we actually do have, the America loved, desired, or at any rate preferred by the vast and often silent majorities of the center.

Trump, a man totally unsuited for the actual job, is a pretend candidate who took over the Republican Party, itself already halfway to being a pretend party by its utter loathing of the real America, and has put America in real danger of having a clown move into the White House.

Trump should have run frankly as a protest candidate on a minor party - say, the Reform Party - ticket, as the original of whom he is an epigone did in the election of 2000.

That same original had before then run in the primaries of the Republican Party, but in those days the party did not yet so thoroughly and exclusively represent the furious alienation of ignorant hillbillies and white rust-belt failures, so he was twice repudiated by the GOP.