Stephen L. Carter, Columnist

Pay Candidates to Drop Out? That Should Be Legal

It's a crime to bribe politicians. When it comes to a decision to run for office, maybe it shouldn't be.

June 22, 2016 at 1:00 PM UTC

Stephen L. Carter is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist, a professor of law at Yale University and author of “Invisible: The Story of the Black Woman Lawyer Who Took Down America’s Most Powerful Mobster.”

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What if Donald Trump took the money and ran?

The money to which I refer is $150 million -- the amount that an unnamed former Trump adviser, probably in jest, told Politico it would take to get the presumptive Republican nominee to drop out of the presidential race. The candidate responded that the notion was ridiculous: “I will never leave the race, nobody has enough money to pay me to leave the race, and if they did, it would be totally illegal anyway.”