What if you ran for President but didn’t actually want the job?
What if you won, to your utter surprise, and found out that it was actually a harder slog than you had ever encountered, opposed at every turn and bound by arcane laws and traditions?
What if your instincts to parlay a situation to your material advantage were constantly being frustrated by cries of corruption and conflicts of interest?
Imagine that in this situation, once the stress had started to pile up and the traditional mid-term losses had tarnished the job a bit further, and you were staring down the barrel of a re-election campaign, someone came to you and suggested, “Mr. President, we have a deal for you. Just after the two-year anniversary of your election, resign. Say that you’ve decided that your talents are more suited for business. It’s true, after all. You will still go down in the history books as having been President. You can get back to running your businesses free of all the constraints of the Presidency. And because the Constitution says that under two years in the job doesn’t count as a term, when Mike Pence becomes President he’ll get to run twice as an incumbent, and we can get three Presidencies for the price of two.”
I don’t know that I’d peg this scenario as really likely. On the one hand, he doesn’t have the world’s longest attention span, and he might be bored with the job. On the other hand, the lure of power and the glare of the spotlight is catnip to him. On the third hand, he does like money, and I’m sure all sorts of sweeteners could be offered to him. So, I’ll call it 1 in 10. But definitely not completely impossible.