As I wrote recently, Donald Trump is an adult baby with no interest in actually being President.
He entered the race impetuously, seeking attention to satisfy his deep and unexamined psychological scars, enjoyed an abundance of cameras over the summer when cable stations needed inexpensive content and focusing on the fascist combover was even cheaper than renting a Kardashian. Now with the new fall TV shows debuting, he’s growing restless, hoping his political program will get cancelled, reliably mentioning an exit strategy in every interview. Even the one-man brand himself is probably in disbelief that his prejudiced bullshit and faux populism have catapulted him for this long over his fellow candidates, weak though they are, a one-eyed racist in the land of the blind.
His continuing campaign is comeuppance richly earned by the GOP, with its bottomless supply of shamelessness, the party’s statistical leader going rogue not so much in policy but in language, stripping away the Gingrich-ish coding from the mean-spirited message meant to appeal to the worst among us and within us. He’s muddied the waters and now wants to swim ashore.
From Maggie Haberman at the New York Times:
In interviews this week, Mr. Trump insisted he was in the race to win, and took aim at “troublemakers” in the news media who, he said, were misrepresenting his remarks. “I’m never getting out,” he insisted Friday on MSNBC.
Mr. Trump keeps noting that he still leads in every major Republican poll and is in a political position that others would envy, and he says he will spend the money to keep his candidacy alive. But he conceded in another interview: “To me, it’s all about winning. I want to win — whereas a politician doesn’t have to win because they’ll just keep running for office all their life.”
He said he had not contemplated a threshold for what would cause him to get out of the race. And he noted that his crowds were even larger than those of Senator Bernie Sanders, the Vermont independent who is drawing thousands to rallies in seeking the Democratic nomination.
While Mr. Trump still leads major national polls and surveys in early voting states, that lead has recently shrunk nationally, and the most recent NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll showed his support eroding in New Hampshire, the first primary state. His recent comments have lent credence to the views of political observers who had long believed the perennially self-promoting real estate mogul would ultimately not allow himself to face the risk of losing.
“Even back in the summer, when he was somewhat defying gravity, somewhat defying conventional wisdom, it seemed to me there would be a moment when reality sets in,” said Rob Stutzman, a Republican political strategist who is based in California. “He would not leave himself to have his destiny settled by actual voters going to the polls or the caucuses.”
Mr. Stutzman was skeptical that Mr. Trump would be willing to endure the grind of a campaign needed to amass enough delegates to make him a factor at the Republican convention in July.•