“Donald Trump has spent more than $1 million on electoral research for a potential presidential run in 2016,” The Post notes.
Sources said the tough-talking “Celebrity Apprentice” host is increasingly being asked to speak at Republican events, and he appeared at the Oakland County Republican Party Lincoln Day Dinner in Novi, Mich., last week to a record crowd of 2,300.
“Everybody tells me, ‘Please run for president. Please run for president.’ I would be much happier if a great and competent person came along,” The Post reports Trump told the dinner’s attendees.
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This furtive presidential mulling sounds familiar. It is similar, at least, to 2011 when Trump also mulled a presidential bid.
“Donald Trump plans to announce today whether he’ll fire himself from Celebrity Apprentice, a source told The Post last night,” The New York City daily reported in May, 2011. “The billionaire businessman, who has been mulling a run for the White House, has been trying to decide whether to trade his TV show for politics.”
“He’s really torn,” the source told The Post. “But he can’t do both.”
Nope. And, perhaps unsurprisingly in hindsight, Trump never pulled the trigger on a run for the White House.
But maybe this time will be different — different from both the 2012 presidential cycle and the 2006 New York state gubernatorial cycle when Trump floated his interest in a bid to become the next chief executive of the Empire State.
“I’m the largest builder in New York, I’m building things all over the country, I have one of the top shows on television. It’s a little hard to leave all of that,” Trump eventually told The Post in 2006.
In a People Magazine report on Trump abandoning his interest in the governor’s mansion, this final paragraph underscores the symbiotic relationship between press and Trump.
Trump, who had played with the idea of running
for the White House as an independent in 2000, stressed that his plan not to campaign for the governor’s job this year “doesn’t preclude me from doing something (political) in the future.”
So, for the better part of a decade and a half, Trump has been tricking news outlets into reporting on his possible presidential bid. Maybe, if papers like The Post stopped reporting on what “sources” close to Trump are saying, the wealthy celebrity may actually be forced to run.
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