Full agreement. Trump will be 75 during the 2020 campaign season. No matter how energetic he is, I don’t see a 75 year old willing to subject himself to the rigorous rat race yet again when he already has achieved it once.
The reason I don’t see him being impeached or hounded into resigning is because he will take the Republican base with him when he goes. I think it would be a damaging event to the Republican party the likes of which we haven’t seen since the assassination of Lincoln. What happened to Nixon and the Republicans during Watergate will be like a walk in the park in comparison. Those people that were marching in Charlottesville and everyone sympathetic to that cause will no longer reflexively line up to pull the lever for Republicans anymore if Trump is forced from office. That’s what Republicans fear and why they won’t do anything about Trump.
Actually agree with Okra here for once. To Trump winning the presidency was an accomplishment, not step one in the goal of making the country better. Inauguration day was the peak of his presidency for him, that’s why he made such a big deal out of it. He’s not going to have any desire to do it again, specially after seeing what it actually involves.
[QUOTE=Covfefe]
The other side is Trump is arguably the leader of the largest cult in United States history. If he suicides he will be lionized by much of his cult for a very long time. And it is virtually guaranteed there will be a tidal wave of deep state conspiracy theories if he suicides, even if he were to do it in front of everyone ala R Budd Dwyer. Has potential to be scary.
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[QUOTE=Sherrerd]
Apparently the official position ‘physician to the President/Director of the White House Medical Unit’ is still filled by the Navy admiral/M.D. who served Obama:
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I just had a horrible thought combining these two ideas: Trump dies in office of natural causes, but the usual suspects spin conspiracy theories that his own physician killed him. :eek:
If his hardcore supporters and the talk-radio/rightwing-blog talking heads who rile them up didn’t care that they were slandering real people with their Pizzagate conspiracy theory, they won’t give a tinker’s damn that they’d be slandering a real person, an admiral sworn to uphold the Constitution and laws and physician sworn to “first, do no harm.” All that matters, all they would need to babble endlessly about the “deep state” killing Trump, is that he’s a government employee holding over from the Obama administration. :rolleyes:
Given the players involved, I would expect that no matter how he passes, even if it’s from natural causes at age 100, there will be a conspiracy theory about how he “really” died.
(I’m impressed that you were able to find that post to quote!) But, yes: conspiracy theory no matter what, as It’s Not says here–
To be fair, any death-in-office of any president is going to lead to a lot of speculation that we haven’t been told the full story–because almost certainly, we wouldn’t be told the full story.
The alt-right/CT industry is something new in history, though, because of the reach of the Internet into our lives combined with the new ability to restrict what we see to be only those sources that support the conspiracy theories.
This doesn’t make any sense to me. Trump can acquire more loot the longer he stays in the Oval Office—and acquiring loot is very important to him. Trump can command crowds into rallies only while he’s President, and he loves those rallies.
He won’t resign unless forced to. And if an election IS held in 2020, Trump will run. It will be no sweat: voter suppression efforts already underway may be enough to ensure his ‘victory,’ and the Russians are still working behind the scenes to work Putin’s will on American politics. In 2016 they made documented attempts to get to the holy Grail: control over the actual voting machine system. Those documented attempts failed in 2016; who wants to bet they’ll fail in 2018 and 2020?
Who Won the Election? NSA Report Suggests Russia Might Have Hacked Voting System - Newsweek
I agree, but some causes of death are less likely to be believed as conspiracies than others.
During the election i tried to come up with the cause of death that would most minimize the number of whackjobs proclaiming it was all a plot. I came up with him standing in the lobby of Trump Tower with TV cameras rolling when an earthquake hits, a light fixture falls and hits him on the head, killing him. Despite massive damage to the building, no one else is killed.
If it was that simple then yes but he is in real panic now. I’m sure Trump had exactly that idea and he fully expected his presidency to be nothing but rainbows while he looted the country. He didn’t expect real danger and at his age and wealth level he has zero reason to risk anything just to make more money.
Or Trump starts talking about how God is on his side during an outdoor rally. He’s them immediately struck by lightning. On a clear day without a cloud in the sky.
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I don’t understand the claim that Trump will not resign because he is so resistant to the idea of failing. Trump has failed repeatedly (four bankruptcies and many other failed businesses) and despite claiming that he’s such a “fighter”, completely folded on the Trump University settlement. Trump, of course, tries to couch these as canny deals and secret victories, but he has no real backbone when it comes to substantial challenge. He clearly ran for President as a lark and was as surprised as anyone at the tidal wave that carried him to the forefront of the election, and he’ll stay in office only as long as he is venerated by some signficant segment of the population and not in danger of being credibly accused of wrongdoing. If the Mueller investigation turns up enough dirt on Trump and his family’s connections with Russian financial interests, he’ll run like a scared fox, stopping only long enough to secure a blanket pardon.
What I do not see happening is Ryan and McConnell turning on Trump and voting for impeachment and conviction respectively. They’ve staked their political futures on Trump and his presumed base of supporters to invigorate the GOP, and they’re too far down that road to turn back. A Republican redupation of Trump would require basically turning over a good portion of the GOP leadership, which seems unlikely short of some catastrophic event. But Trump himself would run away from a group of angry rabbits.
Stranger
I also think he’ll serve out his first term, declare victory (“I said I’d make America great again, and I have!”) and not run for reelection.
However, the ghostwriter of The Art of the Deal predicts Trump will resign, probably by the end of the year: http://www.cnn.com/2017/08/17/politics/art-of-the-deal-author-trump-resignation-prediction/index.html
I’m gonna take my daughter’s birthday, October 10th, because that would be a helluva present for her.
I think Trump definitely has it in him to resign, but he needs two things to do it:
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Assurances of legal protection for him and his clan.
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A way to declare “victory” in his mind (or at least a way to avoid “losing”)
And if he goes, don’t expect him to go quietly into the night either. He’ll do Trump TV or find some other ways to troll people
At least those two, but #2 is easy-- he can just make shit up like he always does. But yeah, I think it’s quite possible he will resign. I can see several scenarios, not the least of which is something “big league” coming out of Mueller’s investigation. And I still think he might resign if it really stops being fun for him-- meaning he just gets fed up with the way everyone is treating him.
But will he go gently (or just gentle)? 
Former business associate expects to go to prison along with Don The Con.
Even more delicious is the possibility that New York RICO laws may have been broken, meaning the federal pardon that Orangeanus may give to himself or have the soon-to-be President Pence gives to him will be useless in a state prosecution. As opposed as I am to capital punishment, I will make an exception for Dumb Donald.
Everyone on The President’s Committee On the Arts and Humanities has quit today.
Trump may not need to resign. He’s well on his way to making the office of the President politically irrelevant as it is. If we could only take the nuclear authorization codes away from Trump, we could ignore him entirely.
If the news agencies were actually smart, they’d stop bitching about being excluded from White House news conferences and press briefings, or focusing on pointless Twitter messages, and just stop covering them at all, focusing instead on the legislative agenda and complete lack of progress in Congress despite being dominated by one party. They should also start referring to Angela Merkel as “Leader of the Free World” and Justin Trudeau as “The Voice that Speaks for North America” with Xi Jinping as “Head of the World’s Economic Powerhouse”. Trump, if he needs to be mentioned at all, should be cited as, “Former reality show host and investment scam huckster Donnie Johnny Trump”. For extra sauce, they could refer to Chris Christie as the “Future Leader of the Republican Party” and Steve Bannon as “The Man Who Would Be King”. The only mainstream news outlets Trump should show up on are SNL Weekend Update and The Daily Show.
Stop paying attention to him and he’ll go away.
Stranger
Bullshit. When has that approach ever worked when it comes to greedy bastards trying to get away with as much as possible? Ignoring him won’t take his power away, nor force him to dump the trash he keeps bringing into the White House, nor remove the authority that the office of the Presidency gives him.
What Trump wants most–even more than wealth and power–is personal veneration, even if it comes with scorn from the media he dismisses as being “fake”. If the media stops paying attention to his facile activities like idiotic tweets or the pointless press briefings that have only become an exercise in pointless power struggles, and instead focuses on the real failures of the adminstration’s political agenda to even support the people who support him, he’ll tire of the constant criticism and lack of attention on his person.
A few months ago, Jake Tapper made a big deal about how CNN was “kicking ass” when it came to reporting on Trump, but in fact they’ve basically become the Trump Clown Show, focusing largely on the most superficial aspects of the Trump presidency in ways that reinforce what critics of the media already believe. I’m not suggesting that they’ll listen to more factual reporting, but if we stop hearing about his fucking tweets shat out in response to whatever he saw on cable news five minutes previous and instead concentrate on hard facts such as that Trump has not made good on a single one of his campaign “promises” like making more favorable trade deals or developing an infrastructure plan that will also revitalize the economy, they can’t credibly be accused of making things up or presenting only one side.
Ignore Trump and he’ll act out like an intemperate toddler just to get attention. His actions will speak for themselves without having to tediously repeat the idiocy he has spewed out on Twitter.
Stranger