For the first time on Tuesday, Donald Trump raised the possibility of dropping out the 2016 Republican primary field if he wasn't doing well.
"This is going to be an ebb and flow, how can I continue to lead by such wide margins?," Trump said on the Today Show.
"I'm a practical person," Trump continued. "If I see things aren't going well, like for instance there are people right now in the Republican party who are not doing well I don't think it's going to change for many of them, at some point you have to get out."
"Right now, I'm leading every poll I get the biggest crowds by far. I had 20,000 in Dallas I had 35,000 people in Mobile, Alabama, you know so far it's looking good," he added. "So I will go and if for some reason I think it's not going to work, I'll go back to my business."
And while Trump is unlikely to go anywhere while he leads the polls, the answer to how he might exit the race could lay in his flirtation in 2000 with a run for presidency on the Reform Party ticket.
When he announced he would not be running that year, Trump decided to lash out at the Reform Party -- and the candidates running -- as not viable options for the presidency. Trump had actively flirted for months with a Reform Party run, making appearances and getting access to early state ballots.
"The Reform Party is a total mess," Trump said on NBC that year. "I will not be running."
"You could only win the whole thing with a totally unified party," Trump added, saying the party was "self-destructing."
In particular, Trump lashed out at then-Reform candidate Pat Buchanan, as well as former Klansman David Duke, who were also seeking the nomination. Trump had slammed Buchanan as "too controversial" to be president.
"The Reform Party now includes a Klansman, Mr. Duke, a neo-Nazi, Mr. Buchanan, and a communist, Ms. Fulani," Trump said in a statement on why he would not run at the time. "This is not company I wish to keep."
In a New York Times op-ed Trump, Trump slammed the "fringe element" of the Reform Party as a reason for not running.
I also saw the underside of the Reform Party. The fringe element that wanted to repeal the federal income tax, believed that the country was being run by the Trilateral Commission and suspected that my potential candidacy was a stalking horse for (take your pick) Gov. George W. Bush, Senator John McCain or Vice President Al Gore.
When I held a reception for Reform Party leaders in California, the room was crowded with Elvis look-alikes, resplendent in various campaign buttons and anxious to give me a pamphlet explaining the Swiss-Zionist conspiracy to control America.
Three things happened to destroy any viable chance that I may have had to run an insurgent candidacy in the fall. The Commission on Presidential Debates, made up solely of Republicans and Democrats, produced debate criteria specifically designed to keep the Reform Party's candidate out of the fall debates. I felt confident that I could sell the American people if I could get into the debate, but my lawyers told me that was unlikely.
Trump said he "seriously thought that America might be ready for a businessman president, someone with an eye for the bottom line, someone who has created thousands of jobs and isn't part of the 'inside the Beltway' buddy system," as a reason for his run.
And while the circumstances today are very different, if the past shows anything, it's that The Donald, in attempting to save face, will lash out at the party and the candidates should the bells toll for his candidacy.