How Come Trump Is Still Around?

Back in 1985 I had to fly down to D.C. to take care of some business at the NIH and I grabbed the 7 a.m. shuttle out of LaGuardia, sat down in the first empty seat and proceeded to begin taking a snooze and waiting for the plane to take off.

As the plane began to fill up, I was vaguely aware that someone sat down in the empty seat next to me and began reading the morning paper and didn’t say ‘hello’ so obviously, he didn’t want to be disturbed, or at least not disturbed by someone like me.

All of a sudden, someone else came down the aisle and said ‘hello’ to my seat-mate, and when he answered by saying ‘hello’ in return, I immediately knew that I was sitting next to Walter Mondale, who had been Carter’s Vice President and then ran against Reagan and got clobbered in 1984.

Without thinking, as soon as I heard his voice, I quickly leaned forward and yelped, “Holy shit! I’m sitting next to someone who ran for President!”

To which Mondale replied, “I did a few other things too.” We then had a nice chat.

The point of this brief anecdote is to illustrate the point that when someone runs for President and doesn’t win, even if they previously served as the country’s Chief Executive, they tend to hang around for a bit and then disappear. This is also what happens to most former Presidents, even…