Analysts predicted that the Republican establishment would do all it could to fight the GOP Frontrunner Donald Trump, and at a time it seemed like that was their ambition, but that’s changed; the party has chosen to unite against Senator Ted Cruz rather than fight Trump. Later on, Trump declared he was certain that he was not going to run independently. At this point in the race, such a theory is less than hot air.

Now, Former New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg has aired his intentions to potentially enter the presidential race on the contingency that Trump or Democrat Bernie Sanders are nominated. He intends to run as an independent, being unable to run on the Democratic ticket. Independents, in election politics, have (with the exception of the Whigs) no chance of winning.

Independents, instead, have a specific function: to hurt a certain party.

Anyway, Bloomberg’s candidacy is decisively harmful to the Democrats. Bloomberg won his election for the mayor of New York City under the Democrat banner, and his policies are moderately Democratic, but to the point that no Republican will endorse him. For example, he supports amnesty and gun control. Should he run, he would inevitably draw votes from the Democrats, a fact Trump himself knows and has made clear, saying unambiguously that he thought Bloomberg would draw votes from Clinton on ABC. In a New York Times article, Trump has described himself and Bloomberg as “friends.”

It is worthy of consideration that Trump might be thinking, firstly, that Hillary Clinton will be nominated (seeing as Sanders can’t rely on the demographic advantage that propelled him in the early states any further in the race) and, secondly, that he would likely lose against her. Bloomberg, then, would either grant him the victory outright, or, in the event that Bloomberg fails to draw significant amounts of votes from Clinton in the general election, damage Democrat unity in the electoral collage.

Potentially, even if Clinton wins the general election, the Democratic electors could still choose Bloomberg over Clinton. In this scenario, Trump could either be granted the victory outright, or it could be reduced to a tie, in which case the decision of the Presidency is thrown into the Republican-controlled House of Representatives. In any scenario in which Bloomberg runs, Trump wins. It stands to reason that Trump (whose intelligence is not to be underestimated) knows this, and has called in a favor from his friend Bloomberg; in fact, Trump said that Bloomberg “called me to help him out” with a construction situation in the Bronx, at what is now a Trump golf course on a former city landfill at Ferry Point.