Trump Isn't Running Again to Get Re-Elected

Why should I believe a single word coming out of the Mar-a-Lago hot air machine? I can’t and I won’t.

Trump is all pissed off. Trump’s down in the dumps. Trump believes he’s been abandoned by all his friends.

These are story leads produced over the last couple of days by the Fake News. And where do these stories come from? They come from the same PR machine that Trump and his staff have been using for the past six years.

This guy doesn’t spend one second wondering whether what he says is true or false. He wouldn’t know and wouldn’t care about what’s information and what’s misinformation if either type of messaging hit him square in the face.

Trump didn’t go into politics and won’t announce a 2024 run because he has any kind of commitment to public service at all. He announced his candidacy in 2015 because he saw it was another way to make a buck. And if you think I’m being unduly harsh, you can read Trump explaining how much he believed he could earn by running for President right here.

I thought, and I certainly wasn’t alone in this respect, that Trump would ride on the back of a red mid-term ‘wave’ to launch his 2024 campaign. But the more I think about it, I am now convinced that Trump doesn’t really care whether the GOP rallies around him or even whether he can win the Presidency again.

Trump won in 2016 by flipping three states – Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin. His total vote in those three states 6,655,560, a seven-percent increase in the number of votes that Romney racked up in those states in 2012.

Trump didn’t receive more than 48% of the total votes cast In any of those three states. Know why he won? Because what’s-her-name flubbed her campaign so badly that she pulled 6,577,816 votes, which was – ready? – eight percent less than the 2012 votes Obama received in those same three states.

Trump didn’t win the 2016 campaign because he built this formidable MAGA machine. He won because his opponent gave the whole thing away.

Now you would think that someone who was in every sense of the word a minority President (I’m obviously not talking here in racial terms) would try to bolster his strength by reaching out to the other side.

But that’s what happens when you’re thinking in political terms.

If, on the other hand, you view voters as a consumer market for whatever crap you can sell them because you’ve created a new brand name – MAGA – and copyrighted it to keep anyone else from using it to cash in, then winning or losing a political campaign really doesn’t matter as long as you sell enough t-shirts, hats and flags at those rallies to cover the costs of the event.

Everyone in the GOP is hoping that Trump will tone things down when he makes his big announcement tomorrow night. Enough with MAGA, enough with voter ‘fraud,’ enough with the nasty and profane threats which apparently cost a lot of GOP votes last week.

After more than six years, these political types still don’t have a clue about whom they are dealing with when it comes to understanding Trump. He doesn’t sit there counting votes. He used to sit in the White House and now he sits at Mar-a-Lago counting cash.

Which is what being in business is all about, by the way. And for Trump, running for President in 2024 is just the next chapter in his latest business venture which started on June 16, 2015, the day he came down to the lobby at Trump Tower and announced his 2016 campaign.

Know what? If I have to choose between a President who wants to run a small business from behind the Resolute desk versus a President who can’t wait to send our troops into battle because he doesn’t want to be the first President to lose a war, I’ll take the small business guy every time.