In his mind Trump never loses. Any loss is always either a secret win that he spins with enormous lies or a result of ‘cheating’ and betrayals. Everyone, including Trump himself, was ready for his endless and utterly false claims of having won the 2016 when it was expected that he could not win. But he did win. A think margin of 70,000 votes in less than a handful of states put him into the presidency and created the conditions of our current chaos.

At moment Trump is running for re-election and in national polls and in the battleground states he is losing to Biden. Moreover, he has never held a lead over Biden during this entire race and with the triple threat of a global pandemic, an economic crisis, and civil unrest the prospect for Trump to take the lead is rather slim. Not impossible mind you but the electoral map does not look good for team Trump.

Given that the map is threatening and Trump’s ego requires that he does not lose I wonder if there is a possibility that he’s going to turn the campaign ship and run it aground.

Not as a ‘quitter’ because that too runs afoul of his over-inflated ego, but could some action, particularly an action taken by the Republican party or elites, such as not having a crowd packed convention, provide him with an excuse that the ‘deep state’ and ‘corrupt elites’ have stabbed him and ‘the country’ in the back and he then drops out of the race?

It was on March 31 when LBJ stood down from his second full term and left the Democratic party in a shambles and Trump has less concern for his party than any party leader in history. He wouldn’t care that a summer declination to run would trash the GOP, all that matters to him is his ego. Before the August Convention the GOP will not have officially nominated anyone as their candidate, leaving open the possibility that it could be someone else.

I am not saying that this is a likely scenario but as we have seen so far in 2020 unlikely is far from impossible.