Will Donald Trump cut and run? It might be more dangerous if he does

At this point Donald Trump's relative absence from the campaign trail has been widely noticed. His detractors (you know, everyone who correctly observes that he is a coup-attempting propaganda-spewing felon) have been piping up with Trump-tweaking theories about why that might be, poking at his age and possible frail health. He's been apoplectic with thumb-tapping rage over President Joe Biden dropping out and the ease with which Vice President Kamala Harris solidified near-unanimous and very vocal support from Democrats, and truly appears to believe that that's cheating and that something something penalty box.

But on a grimmer note, it's possible the recent assassination attempt against him has soured his mood for holding similar rallies—Trump regularly goes on multiweek rage-benders whenever someone on television mildly insults him, and there are few people on this planet who would not be rattled by a bullet skimming past them, only an inch or so off from inflicting an injury that would have ended their lives in one brief blink. He may indeed be a "changed man," and there's nothing in Trump's life to indicate he ever changes for the better.

We don't know. We're not going to be allowed to know. And Trump may yet launch himself into a plausible campaign trail schedule, full of his usual bile and bluster and complaints that the cameras are making his crowds look small when actually there are people lined up for miles to see him and there's a conspiracy to not let you see that. We'll see.

On Bluesky, writer Daniel Roberts offers what I think is a very good Theory of Trump, however, and it's worth taking into account.

This is ... a very good point. Trump has never tried very hard at anything in his life, with the possible exception of his schemes to gain his dying father's money. He has failed at a great many things, from casinos to Trump-branded take-your-pick, and in the end he's walked away from each failure unbothered, always claiming it's not his fault, there was a conspiracy against him, he should too have won an Emmy and so forth. Trump's version of hard work is picking wall colors (gold, he always picks gold) and schmoozing fellow rich people; the moment something goes wrong, he becomes the Grand Emperor of Whining and everyone in earshot is going to hear all about all the ways everyone was mean to him.

Trump's now facing an invigorated opposition that's raising more money, grabbing much bigger crowds, and is memeing their way through his own cherished social media mentions, and by all accounts he's holed up and pissed off. (From his frequent posted ravings, he appears to be far more pissed off about his current predicament than he was even when a jury declared him to be a big-boy felon. That's ... a bit weird.)

So there is a real possibility here that Trump ... folds. Shuts down, holes himself up in Mar-a-Lago, and begins forgoing all but a handful of campaign rallies in favor of raving incessantly about how it doesn't matter what he does, his "enemies" are going to "rig" the election so that he unfairly loses. He had the power of the presidency back in 2020, and still predicated much of his post-July campaign on declarations that if he lost it would be because the election was "rigged" against him; now that he's been reduced to the status of mere private-citizen felon there's no way he's not going to beat that same drum until it bursts.

The worse polls begin to look for Trump, the more he'll abandon the fight and go all-in on declarations that the election won't be legitimate anyway and that the only way to "take back" the country will be to ignore the election results and proclaim him god- emperor so that he can arrest the people who did win.

And, as we saw on Jan. 6, 2021, this demand will be reasonably popular in his base and will be adopted en masse by Republican Party local, state, and federal elected officials who backed the first coup attempt and have continued to vow that they'll do it better next time.

We can only hope that the polls do indeed start to turn and that a month from now, Trump's situation looks that dire. It's a possibility, now that Harris has energized younger voters who were apathetic at best about the Trump-Biden rematch. (Yeah, I know. We all know how difficult it always is to "energize" the groups that frequently have the most to lose, in each election, and how gerrymandering attempts to ensure such apathy, and how incapable and uninterested our supposed free press is in publicizing the issues that actually matter rather than the quip-and-sneer of political hacks, and—no, we're getting off track.)

But we've still got an entire political party that, as Project 2025's actual written-down gibberish asserts in no uncertain terms, believes that democracy must be overturned so that the One True Party can lead the nation into a point-by-point rebirth into fascist glory. We've got a rattled Dear Leader figure who needs to regain the presidency for no purpose more noble than his own attempts to evade jail time.

The only way to fix any of that is to humiliate Trump and his acolytes so thoroughly that it delivers a crushing defeat to the whole of the Republican Party, forcing it into the rebuilding and purge-of-weirdos phase that it ought to have gone through back when Newt Gingrich and Dennis Hastert were becoming national disgraces. That's ... probably not going to happen, with so many billionaire thumbs on the scales for Trump, with The New York Times becoming very nearly a propaganda mill for the Trump campaign, and with the wider indifference of journalists to whether democracy lives or dies.

So instead of one task, we've got two. First we've got to beat Trump. Then we have to figure out how to defeat an almost certain Republican Party drive to install him no matter what election day delivers.

As for another Trump takes-his-ball-and-goes-home theory:

I don't think there's much chance Trump leaves the race, because if he loses this race he's likely going to prison and he knows it, but a campaign led primarily by JD Vance is not going to be a healthy or even plausible campaign. Trump would have better luck stoking another coup attempt. And, unfortunately, he almost certainly knows it.