On “Still Counting,” the podcast he co-hosts with Galen Druke and Clare Malone, pollster Nate Silver said he has a “weird intuition” that President Donald Trump might look for a way to quit after Democrats’ midterm sweep.
The comment came during a postmortem on Tuesday’s election, in which Democrats won control of both chambers of Congress. Druke called some of the party’s wins, including Jon Ossoff’s 18-point victory in Georgia and James Talarico’s in Texas, “eye-watering.”
Silver argued Republicans made “a deal with the devil” in Trump, quickly adding, “I don’t mean that to mean that he’s evil.” The party got what it wanted on the courts and taxes, he said, but at a cost.
“You get your three Supreme Court justices, you get tax breaks for the wealthy, but you pay a lot of f---ing price for that,” Silver said.
Musing on a possible rivalry between Trump and Vice President JD Vance, he went further.
“I mean, that’s part of why I had just a weird intuition that maybe Trump will find some pretense to, to quit, you know what I mean?” Silver said. “Because he could get very, very, very isolated, and that also could make him dangerous.”
“He has no f---ing leverage,” he continued. “I mean, he has some leverage; he’s the president of the United States, right? He has leverage with our allies and things like that, but Republicans —”
“He can still invade Greenland,” Druke interrupted.
“Maybe we should. Let’s see how the 2028 election goes,” Silver joked, before adding, “He has lost the fear factor.”
“We’ll see if Pete Hegseth survives this. We’ll see if Stephen Miller survives this,” he said.
Silver had floated the idea earlier in the episode, asking whether Trump might retreat to Mar-a-Lago and let Vance take over. Malone pushed back. “I don’t think he’d hand it off,” she said, arguing that his work and the people around him keep him going.
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