Like Teddy Roosevelt, Trump Challenger Rocky De La Fuente Considers Bolting the GOP for a Third-Party Candidacy

Reminiscent of Teddy Roosevelt, the bigger-than-life former president who famously snorted and thundered against the duopoly after was he was unfairly denied his party’s presidential nomination in 1912, Trump challenger Rocky De La Fuente is reportedly seriously considering mounting a bid for the Libertarian Party’s presidential nomination next year.

The idea was first floated by Libertarian national chairman Nicholas Sarwark in a Facebook posting late last week. Noting how the Republican Party had cancelled several presidential primaries while exclusively listing President Trump on the primary ballot in several other states, including Georgia, Massachusetts, Michigan, Minnesota, North Carolina and Tennessee, Sarwark invited the president’s challenger to seek the Libertarian Party’s nomination.

“It would be better for Mr. De La Fuente, a lifetime member of the Libertarian Party, to abandon the rigged GOP game and come home to seek the Libertarian nomination,” wrote Sarwark.

De La Fuente, a highly successful real estate developer and entrepreneurial-minded Californian who has done more for the cause of open politics in this country than just about anyone in recent years, is reportedly seriously considering such an undertaking.

“If there is an opportunity to rebuild the idea of the American Dream and create fair access to the ballot,” he said modestly, “it seems like it could be a win-win for everyone.”

Like Vermont’s Bernie Sanders, the deep-pocketed De La Fuente experienced a similarly rigged system while seeking the Democratic presidential nomination in 2016, a year the DNC did everything in its power to ensure Hillary Clinton’s nomination.

Like a modern-day Diogenes in search of an honest party, De La Fuente decided to seek the Republican nomination this time around and has already personally put more than $10 million of his personal fortune into his longshot quest to deny President Trump the Republican nomination — a figure dwarfing the relatively modest sums raised by the president’s other prominent challengers, former Massachusetts governor William Weld and ex-congressman Joe Walsh of Illinois.

It’s a different party, but what he discovered was the same disturbing level of corruption.

On Dec. 16th, De La Fuente filed a federal lawsuit against President Trump, the Trump campaign, the Republican National Committee (RNC) and various state Republican parties as “co-conspirators,” alleging that the president has used “his power to incapacitate political rivals, preferring that to a fair competition on an equal playing field. Through a comprehensive scheme that includes withholding money from objectors, and granting money to cooperators, President Trump, with the aid of the Republican National Committee, has demanded that State Republican Parties cancel primaries or control their outcomes, before a single vote is even cast.”

If true, it’s a textbook definition of racketeering — arguably as impeachable as the two articles of impeachment already filed against the beleaguered and wayward president.

By engaging in such a corrupt scheme for his personal political benefit, Trump has clearly undermined the integrity of the GOP’s nominating process, if not the integrity of the country’s democratic process itself.

The result, the lawsuit contends, is political corruption at the highest levels and an “abuse of power” by the president, as well as an outright “fraud upon the American voter.”

Among other things, De La Fuente’s lawsuit alleges that Trump and his campaign organization began pressuring the RNC and various state party organizations to deny any challengers access to the primary ballot in late 2018. Seven states subsequently cancelled their primaries and/or caucuses altogether while a half-dozen others refused to put anyone on the ballot except for President Trump.

Other states, including Florida, Alabama, Arkansas and Hawaii, charged exorbitant filing fees ranging from $10,000 to $25,000 for access to the presidential primary ballot — fees, incidentally, that weren’t charged to the Trump campaign.

“Our fight,” Roosevelt declared after storming out of the Republican Party’s 1912 national convention in Chicago, “is a fundamental fight against both of the old corrupt party machines.”

T.R. finished ahead of President William Howard Taft in that election, placing second to Democratic candidate Woodrow Wilson with 27.4 percent of the popular vote while carrying a half-dozen states, including Pennsylvania and California, with 88 electoral votes.

While it’s likely that he will remain in the Republican race for the foreseeable future, nobody is better prepared to echo T.R.’s famous remarks more than a century later than Rocky De La Fuente, a principled and doggedly determined candidate who is running for all the right reasons and has personally experienced the corruption of both major parties in back-to-back presidential election cycles.