Don Lemon has spent years lecturing America about Donald Trump.

CNN showed him the door, but the lectures never stopped. They just moved online.

And on one podcast, Lemon put a number on a dream that should have every Democrat in Washington, DC nervous.

Don Lemon Names His Odds on the UNCLOSETED Podcast

Former CNN anchor Don Lemon sat down recently with Spencer Macnaughton, host of the UNCLOSETED podcast, and the talk drifted to a question that keeps following Lemon around.

Does he really want to be President?

Macnaughton went fishing for a headline, and he didn’t hide it. “Let me try and get a headline out of you,” he told Lemon, then asked what chance Lemon gave himself of running for President before he leaves this Earth.

And Lemon took the bait without a second’s hesitation.

“Oh, what percentage chance that I think I’ll run? 65, 70,” Lemon said.

That’s better than a coin flip. Even Macnaughton sounded floored, repeating the numbers back to his guest and pointing out that Lemon had just put his odds at more than half.

Lemon then explained where the whole idea came from. He said people stop him while he’s out reporting to thank him for his work, and then they ask whether he’d ever run for office. His answer to them wasn’t exactly humble.

“Oh, well, definitely. I think I could be a better president than Donald Trump,” Lemon said, describing what he tells those folks.

And he didn’t stop there. “If the people want me, I’ll do it,” he added.

But Lemon admitted the job would cramp his style. “But it is a daunting undertaking to run for president in this country because you’d have to be devoted to it full-time,” he said. “And I would like to devote much of my time to journalism.”

So he floated a fix only a cable news veteran could dream up. Lemon suggested he might run for President and keep doing journalism at the same time, calling it possibly “a way of running that has not been mined.”

A Reporter Who Wants to Cover the Race and Run in It

Stop and think about what Lemon described.

He travels the country covering candidates. He watches how they work a crowd. He told Macnaughton that “there are many very good people who are running and they’re great with the people.” And then he said those same crowds talk to him the way they talk to the politicians.

Lemon said all that attention “makes me wonder if my best way of being and operating in this society, whether it is through journalism or if it is through becoming the president of the United States.”

That’s a man who already sees himself as a candidate while he holds a microphone in front of other candidates. Every interview he does from here on carries an asterisk. Is he asking a question, or sizing up a rival?

Lemon now bills himself as an independent journalist. Mediaite also reported that he recently claimed he’s not a liberal.

Folks who sat through his years at CNN might choke on their coffee at that one. Lemon built his brand on nightly broadsides against Donald Trump and the voters who backed him. Ditching the liberal label now looks a lot like a man swapping coats before he walks out into the cold.

CNN cut him loose in 2023, a couple of months after he told a national audience that Nikki Haley had passed her prime. Then Elon Musk scrapped a deal for a Lemon show on X in 2024 after a prickly sit-down interview between the two men.

So the resume runs from cable anchor, to fired cable anchor, to independent media guy who lost his X deal after one interview, to the Oval Office? Somebody skipped a few steps.

Why Every Talking Head Suddenly Thinks He Can Be President

But here’s the part the media crowd never quite figured out about Donald Trump.

Trump didn’t win in 2016 because he was famous. Plenty of famous people have floated runs and gone nowhere. Trump won because he spent decades building real things and hiring real workers, and because he talked about the border, trade, and endless wars in plain English when no politician in either party would go near those issues.

But somewhere along the way, the professional commentator class took the wrong lesson. They saw a man jump from television to the White House and decided the television part was the qualification.

Stephen A Smith has publicly toyed with a 2028 run. Now Lemon has his own percentage on the record. The Democrat Party, still trying to figure out who it is after the Joe Biden years, has turned into an open casting call.

And that tells voters something about where the party sits. A party with a deep bench of Governors and Senators wouldn’t need a former cable host volunteering to fill in.

Lemon’s pitch rests on one claim: that he could do the job better than Trump. In the exchange Mediaite published, he offered nothing to back it up. He didn’t mention the border, grocery prices, or a single foreign policy question. He mentioned people thanking him on the street.

That’s the whole platform, as far as anyone can tell. Strangers are nice to him, so maybe the country needs him.

Then again, those odds might move with his mood. Lemon himself admitted his current work is “not easy to do every day.” He also opened the whole answer with “I never say never.” Folks parked at the slot machines in Reno say the same thing every night.

But the trend matters more than the man. Every time a media figure treats the anchor chair as a launching pad, the line between reporting on politics and playing politics gets a little thinner. Lemon wants to do both at once, and he said so out loud.

If he follows through, his old interviews with Democrats and his old segments on Republicans will look a little different in hindsight. And plenty of his former colleagues in the press would likely treat a Lemon campaign as serious news rather than the vanity project it resembles from a distance.

Macnaughton got his headline. Americans got a preview of how thin the left’s 2028 bench might really be.

Sources: Mediaite, “Don Lemon Says There’s 65-70% Chance He’ll Run for President,” October 7, 2026; Spencer Macnaughton, UNCLOSETED podcast interview with Don Lemon.