Maybe this is his pivot towards resignation?

using Covid as an excuse and if he has a mild case, claiming symptoms are worse than they are.

❤️ ~✿~❧~🌿~❧~✿~ ❤️

Don't ever forget that he is a narcissist. Nothing outside of him is real. He will stay to the (bitter) end.

And can you be specific about which friends and associates have said he will resign when he's sure he can't win reelection?

This is a captain who will not go down with the ship. He'll jump to a lifeboat leaving his cohorts and perhaps his family to drown.

"Nothing outside of him is real." -- That's actually called solipsism, and this is a description that fits due to his extreme egocentrism and lack of basic empathy.

But, it only fits him sometimes. In actuality, what people think of him is important to him.

His mental maladies are not easily categorized because they are layered.

So to speak, when "shit gets real," he'll switch to a narcissistic survival mode.

If he thinks he'll lose this election in an inarguable landslide, I predict he will use COVID symptoms as a reason to step down rather than face the humiliation of being a loser.

but I really do appreciate your insight. Thank you.

Resigning as President would be a blow to the ego.

He won't resign unless he wants to do a "squeeze play" where Pence becomes president for a few weeks -- just long enough to pardon Trump.

He's not a total narcissist, or total solipsist, or even total psycho. He's all of these things in flux.

Ultimately, he is a survivor. In the face of failure, he'll drop his various megalomanias if he can live to grift and graft another day.

But I don't think he will step out of the election. His ego is far to tightly tied up in being President. He will not willingly let go of that.

For some years now people here have been predicting he'd resign. They've all been wrong. And anyone who thinks he'll step down in any way is likewise wrong. As are those who claim he's trying to lose the election. Wrong, wrong, wrong.

He is a complete and total narcissist, which is the most important thing to understand about him. To Donald Trump, no one else outside of himself is real. No one. Ponder that for a moment.

Okay, are you done pondering, are you back with me? Moving on. For him, no one else is real. The world only exists within his head. So anything he says is reality. Which is why he will say one thing, and then the complete opposite a sentence or two later. Because at the time, at the very time he's saying it, it's true. And what he says two sentences later is also true. Because he lives in the moment, there is, for him, no contradiction.

It might help to watch the movie Memento. While there is no political intent in the movie, the underlying reality of living in the moment, or in this case some 7 or so minutes, is helpful to think about Trump.

And that's also why he says things like the polls show he won the debate. In what most of us would call the real world, he didn't. In fact he lost the debate by double digits. But for Trump, what he says is the truth. And it's not ever influenced by outside reality.

like Ford did for Nixon . . . could he/they be that conniving? . . .

time to ditch the next couple of debates. He hated being on that stage the other night, and according to the polls, he's fallen further behind Biden than before the debate. This WH has lied so much that I don't believe anything they say. I don't put anything past a guy who hates to lose as much as Herr Trumpf, so you may be absolutely correct.

He will not resign.