This kind of rhetoric could help build a mailing list among die-hard Clinton haters. But what does Gabbard need a list for? She’s not running for re-election to her House seat in Hawaii. Her campaign for the Democratic presidential nomination, always far-fetched, is now all but dead. She last appeared on a Democratic debate stage in November, and she scarcely registers in the Democratic primary polls.

But Gabbard has understood all along that pro-Trump actors hope to wedge the hard left from the mainstream of the Democratic Party, as they did in 2016, so that Trump can again win re-election with way less than a majority of the vote. Gabbard is entrepreneurially agitating to claim a piece of that action. As politics, it’s a dead end. But as a grift, it could pay.