Here's How/When Trump's Campaign Ends

One thing we know for sure about Donald Trump: he doesn't like to lose. He hates losers. He even has varying degrees of loserdom in his verbal arsenal: "major," "proven," "total" and "disgruntled" losers, to name a few. So how will his ginormous ego ultimately handle losing the Republican nomination for president? We'll never know, because he won't be in the race long enough for us to find out.

You heard it here first: Trump will soon be exiting the campaign, going out, as I'm sure we'll hear from him incessantly and insufferably, a winner. He will wait for the perfect time, maybe a week, 2 weeks, a month or two months from now. But he'll surely be gone, and while he still maintains a commanding lead in the polls. His announcement will go a little something like this:

"I'm going back to my business. I'm a business guy. I did the math. Look, I will make a ton of money running my company. More money than ever before. Politics? It's a crazy game. Honestly, you have to be crazy to be in it! I'm not crazy. I'm smart, incredibly successful. You know, I ran a historic campaign, and I'm way ahead in the polls. Beating everyone. I did something no one else has ever done. It was so amazing they'll be studying this campaign in college classes. It's obvious I'd have won the nomination. And trust me, I'd be elected president too if I stayed in. This was fun, but I'm gonna leave politics to the politicians and go back to running my phenomenally successful business. I'm leaving on my terms, on top. A winner. Trump always wins (wink!)..."

To be sure, Trump is not going to sit idly by watching his lead appreciably slip until Jeb Bush or Marco Rubio pulls ahead. That sort of public humiliation is not in The Donald's playbook. He won't wait long enough for them to get even remotely close. But given his recent decline in the polls--5 and 7 points respectively in Iowa and New Hampshire since September--he's most likely already contemplating his grandiose, hyperbolic, reality-twisting send-off.

Trump doesn't really care about "making America great again." He doesn't care about politics, and he surely doesn't care about becoming president. What he cares about, what he's always cared about, is Donald J. Trump. This whole campaign charade has been about him. How successful he is, how rich he is, that his toys are the biggest and best, and that he can do anything. And now that he's "proven" (at least in his megalomaniacal mind) that he can win at politics too, he's achieved the only goal that's ever existed here, which is to feed his insatiable id and further build his brand.   

The bigger question is, when Trump finally does leave the race, who'll pick up the Muslim-hating, Mexican race-baiting birther block? Where will his 25% crazybase go? Maybe by that time Republicans will be so soured by the colossal disappointment and wastefulness of Trumpalooza that they'll start moving towards the center and support Bush, Rubio or Carly Fiorina. And that's when the Republican Party and its chairman Reince Priebus will start to breathe a collective sigh of relief that this "historic" circus is finally over. But will the GOP's brand, which has suffered through chaos and dysfunction, be able to recover by then?