Trump Dropped Bomb That He Won’t Run Again If He Loses — It Doesn’t Mean What You Think It Means

Former President Donald Trump dropped the quiet, low-energy bomb that he won’t run again if he loses in November — here’s what it really means.

Over the weekend, Trump almost casually dropped the news as he wrapped up an interview with Sharyl Attkisson on her show Full Measure :

ATTKISSON: And then if you’re not successful this time, do you see yourself running again in four years?

TRUMP: No, I don’t. No, I don’t. I think that that will be, that will be it. I don’t see that at all. I think that hopefully we’re gonna be successful.

ATTKISSON: Mr. President, thank you for the interview, appreciate it.

Others have noted perhaps the most conspicuous thing about this exchange — the fact that Trump didn’t even try to say that he’s definitely not going to lose, or that if he does lose, it’s because he was cheated.

It’s hard to overstate just how conspicuous this is. Anybody who’s ever been asked about losing something in the history of things being lost or won has said “well of course I think I’m going to win” or “I hope I’m going to win” or, if you’re Joe Namath , “I guarantee we’re going to win.”

It would be shocking if anyone turned up an interview with anyone ever in which they said “If I lose? Well then I’m done. I kinda think maybe I’ll be successful. Thanks for the interview.”

It was so conspicuous that I had to hunt down the full interview to make sure they hadn’t edited out some section, but nope, that was it. That was just the end of the interview.

David Frum put it well when he said that Trump is pre-losing. More than the verbal content of the exchange, Trump‘s sad demeanor, his archery defeated affect this the significance of this moment.

Of course, this public show of dejected awareness will not last. It would not surprise me. If, by the time I finished writing this, there is an all-caps Truth Social post saying that Trump-loving Sharyl Attkisson is SPREADING FAKE NEWS AND OF COURSE HE’S NOT GOING TO LOSE AND THAT’S WHY HE WAS BEING SARCASTIC WHEN HE SAID HE WOULDN’T RUN AGAIN BECAUSE HE WAS DOING THE WEAVE OR WHATEVER.

But what I really looking forward to is the Maggie Haberman CNN segment in which Kaitlan Collins asks her about this and Maggie carves him up from the inside.

I don’t know why it is, but Haberman is psychological kryptonite for Trump. And she is no doubt going to make the same observation that I am making – no matter what he says once his bravado returns, Trump knows Vice President Kamala Harris is kicking his ass. And Maggie will think of some deadpan way to make the knife-twist even harder. And Kaitlan Collins’s eyebrows will rub salt in the wound.

Sure, his aides will buck him up with some round of state polls, or a printout of a Rasmussen tweet, and given the structural advantages of the electoral college he might even have reason to be almost optimistic.

But he knows she’s kicking his ass as surely as he knew Hillary Clinton was kicking his ass in 2016 when she got millions more votes than he did, even after the bomb that James Comey dropped on her at the end.

Trump‘s declaration about 2028 says a lot more about 2024. He is running worse than scared — he is running beaten.

As I’ve said before, anybody who thinks they know what’s going to happen in November is full of shit, we have been in completely uncharted territory for at least 10 years and this territory is less charted than ever before. The Harris campaign is taking the right approach by running as if they are losing, because it is a huge structural hurdle to overcome the electoral college.

But my hunch, my intuition informed by every observation I can make is that in the end, this will be a landslide for Harris . The media doesn’t understand the confluence of ordnance rigged to explode turnout for Harris, and neither do most Republicans. I know Democrats have crashed on the rocks over this song before, but a Morning Consult poll last week had Harris down four points to Trump in Texas — and the Democrat leading Ted Cruz for Senate.

Nobody else sees it coming, but perhaps Trump does. And after the series of setbacks, he has been dealt, who could blame him for looking and feeling exhausted and dejected?

He had one attempt on his life in which, as Maggie Haberman put it , “Trump’s ear was hit by something.”

He had another thing that’s being called an assassination attempt but is really a guy who got caught almost making an assassination attempt. I guess assassination attempt attempt is too much to put in a headline.

He had an opponent that was firmly behind him in the polls who was being worked over by the media, then stepped aside and endorsed a successor who is now kicking his ass, and who handed said ass to him at a debate that was so humiliating, dogs and cats ended up roasting him.

But don’t believe for an instant that Trump won’t be back in 2027 to take on a stage full of Republicans, insult their wives and accuse them of being zodiac killers or whatever, and admit to/commit in real time a bunch of crimes. He will win that primary because his supporters will vote for him no matter what — if he’s in jail or buried on Ivanka’s golf course — and there are more of them than people who will vote for anyone else on that stage.

Despite Trump’s moment of public despair, he will shamble his way through rallies, will suffer a humiliating defeat, probably try to get another January 6 going, then retreat to Mar-a-Lago for awhile.

But this whole (waves hand) thing — the rallies, the TV hits, the white-hot media attention, the Whitey-hot adoration of the fans who aren’t walking out of his rallies (there are still a lot of them) — is Trump’s drug. What can replace it? Old-Timer’s Day For Racists?

In that unguarded, despondent moment with a friendly interviewer, Trump revealed the truth about how he feels about a 2024 campaign that he knows is lost, and in that moment he probably believed he would be packing it in weeks from now. It was a rare thing from Trump — an honest moment.

Donald Trump is not going to the White House, but he is most definitely not going away.

Watch above via Full Measure .