Would he dare drop out?

It won’t happen.

I wish it would. I wish we could be done with this clown now, not later, certainly not beyond next January.

Donald Trump wants to be re-elected president of the United States. He is digging up every bit of dirt he can find on Joe Biden; he is concocting “rigged election” conspiracies; he is playing to his base, hoping to fire ’em up.

Yet John Harris writes an essay in Politico that suggests Trump might drop out of the race. Harris reminds us that in March 1968, President Lyndon Johnson went on the air to tell us of a halt in the bombing of North Vietnam … but then saved the surprise for the end of his remarks. He said he wouldn’t seek or wouldn’t accept his party’s nomination for “another term as your president.”

Is such an announcement in the cards if the evidence keeps mounting that Trump will face a potentially resounding defeat in November?

Harris thinks it’s possible. He might be the only journalist who is willing to make the suggestion. As he writes: The Trump-drops-out scenario hinges on the assumption that Trump is less concerned with wielding the levers of government than he is preserving his role as disrupter at large in American politics over the next decade. The latter might be much easier to maintain if he avoids being tattooed as loser in November—especially if the margin is larger than could be attributed, even by his most conspiracy-minded supporters, to media bias or vote-counting manipulation by Democrats.

I find it a fascinating and tantalizing idea. It gives me hope that the end of the Trump Era might be coming sooner rather than later.