Politics

Breaking: Donald Trump Is Not Running for New York Governor Or Anything Else, Ever

Well, The Donald made it official on Twitter: he is not going to run for governor of New York in 2014.

By Philip Bump
Saved Stories
This article is from the archive of our partner .

Well, The Donald made it official on Twitter: he is not going to run for governor of New York in 2014. The Wire can also report that he is not going to run for president in 2016, either, or any office in any other year until the Sun exhausts its internal energy sources and swells to consume our home planet, transforming all of our dusty bones into various elements that then spend eternity floating throughout the cold, quiet universe.

Trump's tweets, with analysis:

  1. Trump did say that he basically wanted the state party to hand him the nomination because he knew that the state Republican party would not do that and therefore he would not have to run.
  2. It is not sad.

There was a Republican governor as recently as 2006.

Right before Trump tweeted that, he did one of his custom sort-of-retweets / sort-of-quotes of one of his followers, teasing what those "bigger plans" might be:

In case you think Trump is serious, you probably haven't yet connected the dots: Trump is suggesting that, hey! maybe he will run for president!

He will not. Trump pretends he will run for office all the time because he likes people to tell him he is great. He pretended to run in the 2012 Republican primary, too, which culminated in his being completely embarrassed at the White House Correspondent's Dinner in 2011.

The most likely reason that Trump will never run is that he doesn't want to have to reveal his financial commitments and — more importantly — how much he's worth. Trump's entire persona is built on the idea that he's a genius businessman worth gobs of money, which only he and people on his payroll know for sure.

Oh, he also won't ever run because he would definitely lose. Trump's dumb claim that he would beat New York's incumbent governor, Andrew Cuomo, is somewhat belied by the fact that a February poll showed him down by a two-to-one margin. Trump stopped pretending he was going to run in 2012 at about the same time his poll numbers fell through the floor, because Donald Trump would be a terrible candidate for any office if he ever had the nerve to run, which he won't.

Regardless, The Wire stands by its previous argument: We should encourage Trump to keep talking about running and keep claiming he will run, because it only reveals just how ludicrous the entire enterprise actually is.

This article is from the archive of our partner The Wire.