Political data analyst Nate Silver has floated the possibility that Donald Trump could quit the White House before his second term ends in January 2029.
Silver said it’s “just a weird intuition” on his “Still Counting” podcast, where he discussed who could succeed Trump and become the 2028 Republican presidential nominee.
Silver suggested the GOP had made “a deal with the devil” by throwing its support totally behind Trump.
“I don’t mean that to mean that he’s evil,” Silver explained. “I mean that in the sense of, you get your three Supreme Court justices, you get tax breaks for the wealthy, but you pay a lot of fucking price for that, right? Because Trump has so sucked out the oxygen from anybody else in the Republican Party.”
Silver argued it was “kind of crazy” that Vice President JD Vance currently leads polling, noting that it “used to be a little more common for presidents and vice presidents to kind of be rivals.”
That dynamic led to a hunch about Trump’s political future, he said.
It’s “part of why I had just a weird intuition that maybe Trump will find some pretense to quit, you know what I mean?” Silver suggested.
He also warned that Trump “could get very, very, very isolated and that also could make him dangerous,” predicting the president would have “no fucking leverage” domestically and had “lost the fear factor.”
Veteran Democratic strategist James Carville has also speculated that Trump may not finish his second term, going so far as to predict before the 2026 midterms that he could leave office by Easter 2027 following heavy Republican losses, which materialized.