Donald Trump just signaled he’s willing to walk away if we make him miserable enough

| 6:48 pm EDT March 26, 2017
Dear Palmer Report readers, we all understand the difficult era we're heading into. Major media outlets are caving to Trump already. Even the internet itself and publishing platforms may be at risk. But Palmer Report is nonetheless going to lead the fight. We're funding our 2025 operating expenses now, so we can keep publishing no matter what happens. I'm asking you to contribute if you can, because the stakes are just so high. You can donate here.

To listen to Donald Trump tell it, his business career has been based on getting ahead by making great deals for himself. The more cynical observer would say that he instead more often makes bad deals and then gets ahead by cheating his way out of them. But if there’s one thing we’ve learned about Trump over the years, it’s something that he just now reinforced: when he knows he’s lost, he’s willing to cut his losses, blame others, and walk away. This is the best news for The Resistance yet.

Donald Trump’s six strategic corporate bankruptcies over the years (PolitiFact) – which have been embarrassing enough that at times he’s been unwilling to admit that they’ve even happened – should have been enough of a guide when it comes to his willingness to walk away from failure. But this week provided proof that he’s just as willing to cut his losses on a bad political deal as he’s always been willing to on a bad business deal.

When Trump and the Republican Party leadership put forth a bad health care bill and couldn’t even rally enough votes within their own party to make it pass, he tried to fix things by making threats against the Republican defectors. But once he realized they weren’t afraid of him, he cut his losses and declared the entire issue dead. Of course he blamed Speaker Paul Ryan for the fiasco, which was only fifty percent correct. Perhaps Trump should have tried actually reading his own bill before he went out and tried to promote it in half hearted and embarrassingly clueless fashion, in between his near constant rounds of golf. But the point is that once Trump realized he’d lost on the issue, he walked away from it. Nevermind that he’d been making it a verbal priority at rallies for a year and a half.

If the overriding goal of The Resistance is to get Donald Trump out of office before he does any more damage, then this has to be seen as good news. Resignation is the quickest – and really the only quick – path for getting rid of him. Once Trump realized he would get nowhere on health care, he walked away from it. That suggests that if Trump concludes he’ll get nowhere by remaining in the presidency, there’s a viable chance he’ll cut his losses by resigning. In fact, bailing on his own failures is the one thing Trump has historically done the most consistently. Make him miserable and hopeless enough in office, and he’ll quit. He just telegraphed it. Contribute to Palmer Report