Will Donald Trump drop out?
Last Summer Anthony Scaramucci predicted that Donald Trump would resign by March of 2020. While I’m sure that’s a prediction that “the Mooch” wishes he’d never made, he risked very little in making it. In today’s whirlwind news cycle such things are only ever registered when they come true. Like people claiming to be psychics, all you have to do is make enough predictions and, unless your name is Sylvia Browne, sooner or later at least one or two of them will come true. Had Michael Moore’s prediction that Trump would win the 2016 election not come true, it would have all but been forgotten, just like his prediction that Mitt Romney would win in 2012 almost entirely has.
These days it’s become fashionable to predict that Donald Trump will drop out of the race in November, thanks in part to a report from “a number of GOP insiders.” While a prediction of Trump dropping out is a safer bet than a prediction of Trump resigning, certainly, it’s every inch as safe to make. Come November nobody will remember nor care, and the predictor’s reputation will be reset for the next time.
Unlike the guy who says, “I don’t give advice and I’d advise you do the same,” I’m not going to wag any fingers at predictors, because I have a prediction of my own. I predict that Donald Trump won’t drop out, but I have some (I think) pretty solid reasons for saying so. If I’m wrong I’ll remind you later. I don’t mind being wrong about this and I’ll say it in advance, because I don’t even want the smallest chance of a possibility that Donald Trump could win a second term. So being wrong about this would be excellent news indeed.
But I don’t think he will drop out because Donald Trump is a narcissist, and unless you’ve personally known any narcissists like I have, my reasons may not seem so obvious. But dropping out would be a kind of admission of defeat, an acknowledgement that Trump is not the all-knowing, endlessly beloved, perfect president we all know him to be. It’s a conclusion that I don’t think Trump the narcissist is constitutionally capable of reaching.
Running and losing is another matter. If he loses he’s got a ready made excuse, one that he’s been working on now for some time. Trump will claim rampant voter fraud. How that plays out in his remaining 78 days in office is anyone’s guess. Establishing a commission to “prove” voter fraud would be tricky. For one thing they would have to come up with that pesky little thing that all conspiracy theorists absolutely hate: actual evidence.
Also, dropping out means going to jail. Trump obviously doesn’t want that. So why would he drop out of a race that he might win? Winning a second term very well may spare him going to prison.
I know what some of you are thinking, he’s filed bankruptcy six times before, which is a form of admission of defeat, so why not drop out so he doesn’t have to face the indignity of losing? It’s a valid point. But I think there is a difference. For one thing, in the upper stratosphere of big business, bankruptcy doesn’t carry the same automatic stigma it does for more commonplace household bankruptcies. Sometimes it’s seen as a clever ploy. The intrepid bankrupt businessman often as not comes out the other side as rich as ever and suddenly unencumbered. It’s an occasion for much backslapping.
The only incumbent president in my lifetime to drop out of a presidential race was Lyndon Johnson. Johnson’s decision was an act of courage. He saw that he was made so historically unpopular because of Vietnam that he couldn’t win in 1968 and dropped out for the good of the party. He was hoping Hubert Humphrey would carry the day, and that he would spare the Democratic Party the bitter, partisan fight to come.
Such motivations are beyond Donald Trump. He’s not capable of making a decision for the good of anyone but himself. As I said, if Trump drops out he’s going to jail for sure. If he remains and contests the election he at least has a chance, however slim. Besides, as a narcissist, Trump believes his chances are better than they are. He really does believe a lot of his own propaganda, that the unfavourable polls are fake, that he really is America’s favorite president, and so on.
I know Donald Trump as he actually is, a child rapist, a murderer, a thief, a conman, a thing of evil, and I want him gone in November, and we must all unite to vote to see that happen. And, as ever, ladies and gentlemen, brothers and sisters, comrades and friends, stay safe.
Robert Harrington is an American expat living in Britain. He is a portrait painter.