Please, please Donald. Don’t go away. Run again another day.

I keep reading the mainstream media’s attempt to describe Trump’s return to the political arena as a big mistake. He’s too old, he’s too tied to January 6th, he’s going to get indicted, blah, blah, blah and blah.

For those who, like me, consider that the GOP should become the permanent minority party or disappear altogether, I think the idea of wishing that Trump will no longer be a player in the political universe is a very big mistake. If anything, his continued attempts to lead some kind of ‘new’ GOP movement that will coalesce and continue to grow around MAGA ideals, is exactly what the Democratic Party needs to keep itself in the majority and grow even bigger in the years ahead.

Why do I say that? Because if you take a look at the numbers, by which I mean votes, Trump’s presence in 3 national elections has taken the GOP from being slightly in front to being bad and then worse. This guy hasn’t done anything to promote the GOP brand. To the contrary he has made more and more voters decide that the last thing they want is to see the Republican Party back in charge.

Let’s start with 2016. Trump carried 31 of 51 states, along with 1 of the 2 electoral votes from Maine. So let’s say he carried 31.5 states, or 61% of all the states. That’s a sizable majority except for the fact that states like Idaho, Montana and North Dakota have more cows than people, and 6 of Trump’s red states together delivered him a whole, big 19 votes. Delete those states from his column and the statewide count between him and Hillary was evenly split.

Not only did Trump lose the national count by 3 million votes, but his total vote number was only 1 million more than what Romney pulled in 2012, a whopping increase of 1.6 percent! The reason Trump won in 2016 was simple: he flipped 3 states — MI, PA, WI — which together counted 46 electoral votes that should have gone to Hillary and would have made her 45th President of the United States.

Now let’s drill down a little further. Trump received 48.3% of the total popular votes cast in those three states, Hillary got 47.7%. He won the electoral votes in those three states by a total of 77,744 votes, or one half of one percent of the popular votes cast in those states. Now we need to drill down a little more.

In the final national poll, Hillary was ahead of Trump by 3.1 points, 45.9 versus 45.8. In Pennsylvania and Wisconsin, she led by 4.1; in Michigan by 2.4. But in all three states, and here is something I’ll bet you didn’t know — Gary Johnson went into the election with roughly 7% support in each state, but when the actual votes were counted, the Libertarian slipped down to just over 3%.

Here’s the 2016 bottom line: Donald Trump became the 45th President not because of some alt-right, populist surge, not because lots of ‘secret’ racists could express their true beliefs at the polls, and not because the Russians corrupted the vote. I heard all those stories back then, the same stories continue to ebb and flow now, but the voting numbers make it clear that what happened is that Libertarian voters in 3 states realized as they walked into the voting booth that they didn’t have to just make a ‘protest’ vote for the very first time.

Now let’s look to2018. Trump held 40 large rallies during the mid-term campaign. He held 4 rallies in Montana to promote the Senate race of Matt Rosendale but Rosendale lost to Jon Tester who still happily sits in his blue Senate seat. He went into Nevada twice to push the Senate campaign of GOP incumbent Dean Heller who lost to a Democrat, Jacky Rosen, by 5 points. He probably helped Josh Hawley defeat Claire McCaskill in Missouri with two large events, but I suspect the last thing the current GOP leadership (if there is a current GOP leadership) needs to be reminded about is how Hawley welcomed the January 6th Capitol rioters with a clenched fist.

What we really need to remember about 2018, however, an election that Trump claimed to be a ‘referendum’ on his first two years, was what happened in the House. The Democrats, who were predicting a blue ‘wave,’ ended up getting a blue tsunami and picked up 40 seats, their largest, single-election gain since 1974. Some referendum on Trump, right?

Now we come to last year, an extraordinary victory for Joe and Kammie, primarily because it wasn’t just the results of the Presidential race which showed how little support Trump was able to generate after four years, but let’s not forget what then happened in Georgia after Trump showed up and begged the voters to prevent a catastrophe if both the House and the Senate went blue, which is exactly what occurred the next day.

So, to sum things up, here we have a politician who it can easily be said won his only electoral victory completely by accident and then frittered the whole thing away. What’s more, as he continues to rant and rave about the 2020 vote steal, he’s managing to create an even greater degree of antipathy tied to his name. The latest polls show that while two-thirds of Republicans want Trump to run again in 2024, more than 50% of American voters would rather see him disappear.

Which is exactly why I want Trump to stay around. Because in not one, not two, but in three successive elections, he has demonstrated that all he brings to the GOP are a bunch of right-wing jerks like Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene whose national ‘America First’ appearances seem to have been copied right out of the Barnum & Bailey freak or clown show.

Please stick around Donald. Please.