Dude thinks he’s infinite
Trump is breezily telling major news outlets that he plans to be dictator for life.
Trump did not rule out the possibility of seeking a third term in the White House, which is prohibited by the Constitution under the 22nd Amendment, saying in an exclusive interview with NBC News that there were methods for doing so and clarifying that he was “not joking.”
“A lot of people want me to do it,” Trump said in a Sunday-morning phone call with NBC News, referring to his allies. “But, I mean, I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.”
It’s not about “people want him to do it.” It’s about the law. He can’t do it. He’s officially constitutionally limited to two terms.
“I’m not joking,” Trump said, when asked to clarify. “But I’m not — it is far too early to think about it.”
No; it’s never the right time to think about it.
Amending the Constitution to abolish the two-term limit would be exceedingly difficult, requiring either a two-thirds vote of Congress or two-thirds of the states agreeing to call a constitutional convention to propose changes. Either route would then require ratification from three-quarters of the states.
Yeah that’s not happening.
Also by then he would be 82 and he would have used up the world supply of brown makeup.
The president pointed to his poll numbers, saying that “a lot of people would like me to” hold office for a third term.
His poll numbers don’t translate to people wanting him to serve an illegal third term.
He’s going to stay alive for the first two years of his term, and then go into sudden decline, and then we’ll be stuck with Vance for ten years. At which point there won’t be much of a country worth saving.
I don’t think we should take the threat of a third-term lightly. We may recall Trump’s saying at rallies things like ‘If you give me your vote, you’ll never have to vote again.’ Just to depress everybody, here is that good commentator Brian Tyler Cohen on the matter (in which a video is shown where, in an interview with Chris Cuomo, Steve Bannon says that they have already worked out ways to secure Trump a third term):
https://youtu.be/J08B_3JgutE?si=Q2HhsFgq4QFxLniN
Most of the things he’s doing aren’t allowed by the Constitution. If no one stops him, he gets away with them.
So what happens if the Republicans simply nominate him for a 3rd term? Who is going to stop them and how exactly?
To oppose Trump. as with Nixon before him, is to stand with the Founding Fathers and the Constitution. Next time around, the voters may well dump the whole US democratic tradition, in the last free election of all time.
Still, Mussolini got the trains running to schedule, or so the story goes. Maybe only until the start of WW2.
Judging by the (admittedly weak sauce) primary there were a lot of people that didn’t want him to run a second term.
I think I’d echo Iknklast’s sentiments here – or even be a bit gloomier.
There’s a lot of commentators who seem to have an in-some-ways-admirable-but-still-naïve faith in the rule of law: they’ll point to this or that Court ruling against Trump, putting a stop to a given policy, or whatever. And the subtext here is that that’s important because governments are bound by the rule of law, and so will take heed.
Yeah, but no.
Historically, that’s been the case. One might even argue that that’s one of the signatures of the modern State. Even Charles I recognised that he was bound by law, which is why he attempted such chicanery to get around it. It bothered him. When Parliament decided finally that he had to be got rid of, they went to enormous pains to find a legal justification; they at least paid lip-service to the idea of a trial. When push came to shove, he was executed, not assassinated. And that principle has, in the 400 years since, spread throughout the world. Whether it be in the common law or civilian tradition, and on across to post-war Japan, the idea has been that governments govern under the auspices of law.
Even granted that those governments make the law, they’re still bound by it.
But Trump, it seems to me, is different, because he does not care about the law. If the Courts rule against him, he might – for the discernable future – make a show of complying. But I can’t honestly see that he recognises that the law has authority; and I would not be at all surprised if by the end of the year he’s simply ignoring the law altogether.
No: I’d not be not-surprised. I’d be surprised if the law was any kind of constraint at all.
Trump is fond of paper-thin justifications for his actions. It’s all he needs to maintain the support of his followers, and he doesn’t care about anyone else. Remember “Stop the Steal”? In this case, IIRC, the claim is that the two-term limit only applies to someone who has served two terms consecutively.
This, of course, is completely absurd, but it’s all he really needs, especially with a supine SCOTUS.
You’d think (theoretically, at least) that Trump threatening to violate the Constitution in this way would upset all those Second Amendment People. After all, this is the kind of tyranny they claim to be bearing arms in order to prevent. Imagine if Obama had mused aloud about doing the same thing in month three of his second term.
Politics is the art of the possible; I mean the art of what you can get away with. But a French court has just given the far-Rightist Marine Le Pen a 4-year notional prison sentence for embezzlement of European Parliament funds, and as well blocked her from running in the next French presidential election.. And where she goes, can Donald Trump be all that far behind?
https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/mar/31/marine-le-pen-barred-from-running-for-french-presidency-in-2027
Yeah, it’s not as if laws and constitutional restraints have proven themselves to be such insurmountable obstacles to his autocratic ambitions so far. Even Hitler had to spend some time in jail for his attempted coup d’état, dammit! Even before Trump was elected back in 2016 it was (or should have been*) obvious to anyone who had been paying any attention at all that this guy was a threat to democracy and the rule of law, and many public intellectuals (Snyder, Applebaum, Mounk, Levitsky and Ziblatt, Frum etc.) did indeed predict that the U.S. would see the same subversive behaviors we had previously witnessed in places like Russia, Hungary, Turkey, Venezuela etc. (capturing or undermining institutions, putting foxes in charge of all the hen-houses, weaponizing the legal system, flooding the public sphere with disinformation, rigging elections etc.). Many of the same public intellectuals also predicted that Trump vol. II would be a lot worse than Trump vol. I: Not only is he much better prepared this time around, and not only have all the loyal small-d-democrats, like Liz Cheney, been purged or left in disgust, but the last four years have conclusively shown that he really can get away with anything.
Lately, however, people like Anne Applebaum and Steven Levitsky have admitted that even they didn’t expect what we have been witnessing over the last few months. Neither of them could think of any historical precedence for any of this. They expected something like Hungary, where Orban slowly and gradually consolidated his power over many years. We’re all familiar with the “boiling frog” metaphor. This is different. Rather than gradually heating the water, Trump and his hitman Musk have decided to go straight to the boiling phase (indeed, as Timothy Snyder mentioned in a recent interview, we’re already there). So it’s not simply that the U.S. is showing the same tendencies as Hungary or Turkey. It’s actually worse. Many still cling to the American exceptionalist** idea that the death of democracy can only happen in less “advanced” societies in Eastern Europe, South America, Asia etc., and the the same kind of autocratic behaviors that have killed democracies elsewhere cannot possibly work in the U.S. The facts tell a different story. Brazil’s response to its own “Trump” figure, Bolsonaro, as well as it’s own “January 6th” incident, has been superior to the American one in every way, and Poland has thus far done a far better job of fighting back against its authoritarian populists than the U.S. Indeed it seems clear by now that the apocryphal system of “checks and balances” was at best a useful fiction that only “sort of” worked in so far and to the extent that politicians believed in them and acted accordingly. Well, if so, the cat is now out of the bag, and there is no way to get it back inside.
* As I keep saying, Trump is many things, but subtle is not on the list. One of the very few things he can not be accused of is having a hidden agenda. Deniability doesn’t get less plausible than this.
** And you don’t have to be American to be an American exceptionalist. I have heard the same sentiment from many Norwegians.
Well, violating the 14th amendment didn’t stop him this time ..
Bjarte, maybe the fiction writers should be the ones we listen to. I actually did predict this more than four years ago, and I’m pretty sure I’m not the only one who was writing dystopian fiction about the Trump administration. There are a lot of us who saw more than the pundits, probably nearly everyone on this site, for instance. The political chatterers were so determined to force the administration into a pattern of normal politics as usual that they ignored the reality that Trump was not, is not, and will never be politics as usual. It’s one of the reasons for his appeal, the fact that he knows nothing, despises expertise, and believes he has been chosen.
Everyone spent so many, many years deriding politics as usual, and now we’d be thrilled to get back to it. At least then you could be the loyal opposition and hope that maybe in the midterms things would turn around.
I agree with Trump in that there is a long way to go in the current term. This agenda of his has the potential to backfire badly. Particularly with the Musk team creating domestic havoc, and the Trump team sabre rattling abroad.
The Constitution is very resilient, and the framers had no use for monarchs or petty dictators, so Trump has to overcome that little problem. He’ll run into more brick walls as he goes.
What brick walls? He hasn’t run into one single brick wall – they all turned out to be cardboard.
I think he’s pushing the boundaries to see how far he can go. There will have to be some Congressional or Judicial stopping points, or at least I hope so. Then again maybe I’ve bought into the narrative that our Constitution is impervious to these assaults. I hope we don’t have to find out.
You’re overcomplicating it. He’s pushing against the boundaries to do whatever he wants. He’s not testing, he’s doing. He’s not meta, he’s the real thing. Of course we all hope there will be limits, but it’s all too obvious that there WON’T.
You’re right of course, I’m giving him too much credit. His only real concerns are vanity and vengeance. I’ve seen no interviews, no addresses, no public statements, no expressions at all from him that can’t be explained by one or the other.
Trump is a self-admitted wannabee dictator, with as much insight into himself as found in a cockroach. (Sorry, cockroaches for that insult.) The January 6, 2021, event in Washington could have become with a bit more time and mass support from the Republican heartland, a fully-fledged coup d’etat.
It is obvious to all but the wilfully blind that Trump is no democrat. Moreover, his MAGA slogan is framed so as to play to the ego of America, and definitely not its conscience. (Winner Ronald Reagan had appealed to the ego and his opponent Walter Mondale to the American conscience in the 1984 Presidential Election.) Trump may have been inspired by Reagan’s victory to follow his example, but it came naturally to him anyway. He has the rest of this term to prepare for becoming the US counterpart of ‘Papa Doc’ Duvalier of Haiti, President for Life.
A job for life maybe, but not for long. The only durable part of this is the damage inflicted; if you wanted to build something (the white workers’ paradise with all the shitty manufacturing jobs onshore) you’d do it differently.
BKiSA, Oymandius comes to mind. Unlike Ozymandius, Trump is creating the destruction himself.
As for manufacturing jobs, a lot of them weren’t shitty; they paid well with good benefits because they were unionized. That’s what people want, is good jobs back. In Trump world, they will likely be sweat shops because no unions.