The headline virtually jumps out of the Drudge Report’s homepage: “Roger Stone: Trump may not run for re-election.”
To which many observers will say, “Oh, may it only be so!”
As the flamboyant Stone, the long-time political consiglieri and boastful dirty trickster, is thought to be among the most insightful Trump-whisperers of all, this report is not to be taken lightly.
To be clear, Stone doesn’t claim that the president himself has told him any such thing. Here’s how the insight is described in Spectator USA:
“Stone thinks the President is not going to run for re-election. He believes that Trump likes ‘the adulation part’ of being President but not the actual governing. And: ‘He doesn’t like the fact that half the people in the country hate his guts. He’s hypersensitive to criticism. I could easily see him saying, Well, I made America great, I’m heading to the golf course. Mike, good luck. Again, Stone says his opinion does not come from being in possession of inside information. In this case, it’s a judgment he says comes from knowing Trump for some 40 years.”
As it happens, this tracks rather closely to what I wrote (intending to be somewhat puckish) earlier this year here at the Washington Examiner, explaining why Trump might want not just to avoid a re-election campaign, but actually resign early:
“You can claim you are going out on top. Every showman knows that’s the way to leave the stage. Your exit message (whether true or not) is that you have accomplished more in 16 months than anybody else could have dreamed of, that you will leave America already great again, that you will leave a superlative team in place to run the show from here on — and that by leaving office now, you free yourself to attack all the ‘fake news’ outlets and the deep state without it looking like you are doing it to save your own skin, but only for the benefit of the country.”
And: “Here are the super-duper-awesome successes for which you would (rightly or wrongly) claim credit: the lowest unemployment rate in 17 years and the second-lowest in 50 years; continuing low inflation and interest rates (if you stay any longer, you’ll be blamed for both going up, because they will, like rockets); a (temporarily) narrowing trade deficit; and a ton of new business investment.”
Whatever one’s opinion of Donald Trump or his presidency, most sentient people wonder how long Trump can go before the constant turmoil he deliberately causes will wear thin even on his own supporters. If I had a dollar for every time Trump supporters have told me they needed him to “shake things up,” but that the Trumpist style may not be advisable forever — well, I’d be rich.
One of the most accomplished of all 19th century U.S. presidents, James K. Polk, achieved all his stated goals in his first term and then indeed “went out on top,” declining to seek re-election. If Trump does the same, he will leave office undefeated and undaunted.
If Roger Stone is reading Trump’s psyche as well as he usually does, “undefeated and undaunted” may very well be an appealing prospect for the orange-haired billionaire.
