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Trump Believes He’s a ‘Savior’ Sent by God and Will Never Cede Power: Stoddard
President Donald Trump has little intention of leaving the White House says veteran political analyst A.B. Stoddard, arguing that he believes he is a “savior” and will either try to find some way to run for another term, cancel the election, or do something else radical.
“I don’t think he has any intention of leaving,” Stoddard told columnist Bill Kristol.
She believes there are “two paths” for Trump.
“He does not want to fall apart in public,” Stoddard said, adding that he will be forced to “make a calculation at some point.”
Asking if Trump can “serve and walk across stages, make speeches, be as visible as he wants to be, which he really needs?” she noted that the president “needs to be on camera as many days a week as he can.”
“I think he will make the calculation that he cannot run again if he’s feeling that he’s aging too quickly” for another term, she said.
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“He has no intention, I believe, of having any kind of successor that’s not in his family. So he’s either going to find a way to try to run for [another] term, or cancel the election, or do something very radical,” which is “not beyond him,” she said.
Stoddard says she could see Trump trying to pass his presidency off to his son-in-law, Jared Kushner, his son, Donald Trump Jr. or his daughter, Ivanka Trump — but not Eric Trump. And he’s not going to walk away from the money he is making now — the most he’s ever made in his life.
It’s “absolute lunacy” to think that he is going to walk away from “the two things that soothe his demons,” which are “adulation and money.”
“I genuinely believe, Bill, that he believes that he is some kind of, you know, savior,” Stoddard declared.
“I mean, it’s always about how he was brought here by God,” she continued. “I don’t know that he has [the] specifics down, but he certainly believes he is special, and he craves that, that central, you know, all the attention has to be on him.”
She also said that had Trump lost the 2016 election to Hillary Clinton and never been president, he would have “just sat on Fox three days a week, just bashing her.”
She concluded that she cannot see Trump just going off “like an old man into the sunset.”
A.B. Stoddard: “I don’t think Trump has any intention of leaving…He’s either going to find a way to try to run for second term or cancel the election or pass it off to Don Jr….The idea that he’s going to give up [the adulation and money] is lunacy.” pic.twitter.com/313ZSZQR0o
— Bill Kristol (@BillKristol) April 24, 2026
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Image via Reuters
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