In a bizarre twist to the presidential election campaign, two maverick Republicans have left their party and thrown their hats in the ring for the Reform Party nomination.
Billionaire New York property developer Mr Donald Trump stole a march on Mr Pat Buchanan, a former White House aide to Presidents Nixon and Reagan, by launching his bid to be the Reform candidate a day before and thus taking publicity away from Mr Pat Buchanan.
Mr Buchanan, who ran unsuccessfully for the Republican nomination in 1992 and 1996, had been signalling for some months that he was going to quit his party and try for the Reform nomination because he could not raise enough funds. He made it official yesterday in a hotel in Virginia where he launched a strong attack on both the Democratic and Republican parties, neither of which "speaks for forgotten America".
While a room of supporters chanted "Go, Pat, go," Mr Buchanan set out a strongly conservative, even isolationist, plat form to save "God's country from the cultural and moral pit into which it has fallen".
He pledged to "bring our soldiers home" and not to involve the US in a foreign war "unless our country is attacked or our vital interests are imperilled".
Mr Trump had launched his own attack on Mr Buchanan at the weekend. "He's a Hitler lover. I guess he's an anti-Semite. He doesn't like the blacks, he doesn't like the gays," Mr Trump told the Meet the Press TV programme. He predicted Mr Buchanan could get only 5 per cent of the vote and it would be a "really staunch right wacko vote".
Mr Buchanan has denied the anti-Semitism charge, based on articles he wrote many years ago. The pro-Hitler allegations have been sparked off by his recent controversial book on US foreign policy in which he argues that the Nazi expansion in Europe did not have to draw the US into the second World War, and that Britain and France should not have gone to war over the German invasion of Poland.
Both Mr Buchanan and Mr Trump have their eye on the $12 million in federal funding which will go to the Reform Party in this campaign because of the votes won by the party founder, Mr Ross Perot, in previous elections. The party will not choose its candidate until next August.
This latest development will cause some concern to the campaign of Governor George Bush, who is favourite to be nominated as the Republican candidate after next year's primary elections.
Mr Buchanan as the Reform candidate would have no chance of winning the presidency but he could siphon off substantial numbers of disaffected Republican voters to damage Mr Bush in a close race with either the Vice-President, Mr Al Gore, or his Democratic rival, former Senator Bill Bradley.
Observers find it difficult to take Mr Trump's entry into the presidential stakes seriously, but he does have his huge personal wealth to draw on when opposing Mr Buchanan.
Governor Jesse Ventura of Minnesota, formerly a professional wrestler, who has become a powerful figure in the Reform Party, is opposed to Mr Buchanan as a candidate because of his anti-abortion stance and has been encouraging Mr Trump to enter the race.
Mr Perot, who has run in the last two elections as the Reform candidate, is said to resent Mr Ventura's rising influence in the party but he has not yet indicated his own intentions.