Kathrine Frich
The president has kept hinting that he might not step aside at all.
Passing the torch is supposed to be part of every big job.
Most leaders spend their final years training a replacement to keep their team winning long after they leave.
In Washington right now, one former insider says that playbook has gone straight out the window.
Going through the motions
With Americans heading to the polls for the November 3 midterm elections, Donald Trump has been crisscrossing the country, including a recent stop in Michigan.
According to the Irish Star and Mirror US, former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci says the president is only pretending to help fellow Republicans win.
Scaramucci briefly worked for the first Trump administration before becoming an outspoken critic of the MAGA movement. While promoting his new book, All the Wrong Moves, on the Planet PEP show, the co-host of The Rest Is Politics: US podcast argued that the president is mainly interested in himself.
“He doesn’t care. I mean, people that think he cares don’t really understand him. He is going through the motions with the campaigns, but he’s more or less talking about himself,” Scaramucci told Planet PEP.
Burning the place down
On the campaign trail, the president’s speeches have taken some odd turns. Scaramucci pointed out that Trump has even remarked on the body parts of certain candidates during rallies.
Behind the scenes, the former aide believes the president wants his party to feel small without him. Scaramucci told Planet PEP:
“I think he’s a full-on narcissist, and I think the message from the president to his fellow Republicans is, ‘Hey, guess what, guys? I don’t care. Moreover, I’m gonna say to people, you were nobodies before I got here. And you’re going to be nobodies after I leave here.'”
Rather than grooming a 2028 contender to make himself feel less replaceable, Trump will likely sabotage anyone who steps up, Scaramucci claimed.
“The president’s not that type of person. He’s a little bit more of a nihilist, and he’ll want to burn the place down before he lets one of his people be his successor,” he added, predicting this tension will play out over the next two years.
Talk of another run
Meanwhile, the president has kept hinting that he might not step aside at all, despite the US Constitution barring a third term. At a rally in Iowa, Trump insisted he still had the “right to run” again.
“They cheated us on the second one because we won it three times, so I think I have the right to run again,” Trump told the crowd, as cited by the Irish Star.
Not everyone in his orbit buys that talk. Michael T. van der Veen, a lawyer who defended Trump during his second impeachment trial in 2021, brushed off the third-term chatter in comments to the Irish Star: “Distraction, I think that’s distraction.”
