Joe Scarborough Says Trump Won’t Run In 2020, Says ‘He Didn’t Want To Be Elected President”‘
MSNBC host Joe Scarborough made a bold prediction earlier this week, making it clear that he doesn’t believe President Donald Trump will run for office again in two years.
The Morning Joe host explained that Trump will “cash out” and decide it’s not in his best interests to run for president a second time, opting to let someone else run for president on the Republican ticket.
Scarborough made his prediction while he and his cohost/fiancee Mika Brzezinski were guests on CBS’s The Late Show, speaking to Stephen Colbert. Scarborough, to make sure everyone in the audience (and watching on TV) believed his statement to be genuine, said he was “dead serious” about his belief, according to reporting from The Hill.
Scarborough suggested his prediction was based on another belief he has about Trump: that the business mogul never wanted to win the election in 2016 to begin with.
“He didn’t want to be elected president, he didn’t think he was going to be elected president, he didn’t even think he was going to get the Republican nomination,” Scarborough explained.
Colbert disagreed, joking that Trump would want to at least give the American citizenry the chance to “correct themselves” from what he implied was a mistake they made in the last presidential election.
“If Donald Trump doesn’t run he takes away that corrective action of history and therefore his presidency is whole and unjudged if he just doesn’t run again,” Colbert said.
Joe Scarborough gives his prediction about 2020 and Trump https://t.co/O39Er1VePB pic.twitter.com/IyumCYMnwW
— The Hill (@thehill) October 19, 2018
This isn’t the first time that Scarborough has suggested that Trump would sit out in 2020. He made similar claims in April, writing a Washington Post op-ed suggesting that “Republicans…can relax” because “it’s becoming clear” that Trump wouldn’t run again.
Others aren’t so sure, however, that Trump would be so willing to head to the sidelines. He did, after all, file documents to run for re-election just days after he assumed office in 2017, as CNN’s Z. Byron Wolf pointed out in April. Wolf, responding to Scarborough’s op-ed, added that it’d be “hard to see someone like Trump simply stepping down without some kind of excuse,” adding that “giving up would be totally out of character.”
Trump himself has been alluding to looking forward to a 2020 run himself in recent weeks. In September, he even tweeted out that he didn’t think any Democrat stood a chance against him.
Democrats “are going CRAZY only because they know they can’t beat me in 2020!” Trump said.
