batmagadanleadoff wrote: ↑Tue Mar 25, 2025 8:49 pm
Yeah, right. President Hitler is gonna go quietly into the night. /rollseyes
It's gonna take a lot more than court orders, words on paper, to stop this trainwreck.
He's already openly talking about a third term.
President Donald Trump on Sunday declined to rule out seeking a third presidential term — an unconstitutional act explicitly barred under the 22nd Amendment — saying that “there are methods which you could do it.”
In a phone interview with NBC News’s Kristen Welker, Trump suggested that multiple plans have begun to circulate for him to run for a third term. He pointed to unspecified polling as an indicator of his popularity and claimed he had the “highest poll numbers of any Republican for the last 100 years.”
“A lot of people want me to do it,” Trump said. “But we have — my thinking is, we have a long way to go. I’m focused on the current.”
Asked whether any third-term plans have been presented to him, Trump said: “There are methods which you could do it, as you know.” Welker then mentioned a hypothetical plan where Vice President JD Vance would run in 2028 and “pass the baton.”
“Well, that’s one. But there are others, too,” Trump responded.
“I’m not joking,” Trump said.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics ... stitution/
One possible method, Trump acknowledged during the interview, was Vice President JD Vance running for the office, then passing the baton to him, according to the transcript.
https://www.nytimes.com/live/2025/03/30 ... third-term
This method would exploit the supposed loophole in the 22nd Amendment, which prohibits persons from being
elected to a third Presidential term.
See this Politico article published a few months ago, shortly after Election Day:
How Trump Could Snatch a Third Term — Despite the 22nd Amendment
Four ways Trump could stay in power beyond 2028.
Less than two weeks have passed since the last presidential inauguration, but try to imagine the next one.
It’s Jan. 20, 2029. The nation has weathered another tumultuous four years under Donald Trump. Democrats are desperate for the Trump era, at long last, to be over. Republicans have relished it.
Now, imagine this: The chief justice begins to deliver the oath of office. The next president raises his right hand and says:
“I, Donald John Trump, do solemnly swear…”
It’s the stuff of liberal nightmares and MAGA dreams: a third Trump term.
But it can’t happen, right? After all, the Constitution imposes an explicit two-term limit on the presidency — even if those two terms, like Trump’s, are non-consecutive. “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice,” the 22nd Amendment mandates.
Even Trump, notorious for bending norms and breaking laws, couldn’t possibly circumvent that clear constitutional stricture, right?
Don’t be so sure.
Around the globe, when rulers consolidate power through a cult of personality, they do not tend to surrender it willingly, even in the face of constitutional limits. And Trump, of course, already has a track record of trying to remain in office beyond his lawful tenure.
“Anyone who says that obviously the 22nd Amendment will deter Trump from trying for a third term has been living on a different planet than the one I’ve been living on,” says Ian Bassin, who was an associate White House counsel for President Barack Obama and is now the executive director of the nonprofit advocacy group Protect Democracy.
If Trump decided he wanted to hold onto power past 2028, there are at least four paths he could try:
He could generate a movement to repeal the 22nd Amendment directly.
He could exploit a little-noticed loophole in the amendment that might allow him to run for vice president and then immediately ascend back to the presidency.
He could run for president again on the bet that a pliant Supreme Court won’t stop him.
Or he could simply refuse to leave — and put a formal end to America’s democratic experiment.
Each path would face serious political, legal and practical impediments. But the prospect of a third Trump term shouldn’t be dismissed with a hand wave.
Trump, after all, is definitely not dismissing the prospect. He’s been openly floating it for years.
In August 2020, he told supporters: “We are going to win four more years. And then after that, we’ll go for another four years.”
In May 2024, he again mused about a three-term presidency.
On Nov. 13, 2024, a week after winning his second term, he told House Republicans: “I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say, ‘He’s so good we’ve got to figure something else out.’”
And just last weekend, he said: “It will be the greatest honor of my life to serve not once but twice — or three or four times,” before quickly adding, “Nah, it will be to serve twice.”
Perhaps it’s all just a big joke to Trump. Perhaps he’s baiting the media. But the fact that he keeps talking about it shows that it’s on his mind. It’s time to take the prospect literally — and seriously.
Why Trump Might Do It
There are a couple of threshold objections to this thought experiment, and they’re not constitutional but physical and psychological: Would Trump, who will be 82 at the end of his second term, be healthy and fit enough to serve a third? And if so, would he even want one?
On Jan. 20, 2029, he could simply retire to the fairways of Mar-a-Lago, having vanquished all of his foes and cemented his status as a world-historical figure.
Maybe. But if he has the capacity to continue in office, Trump might have strong incentives to try to retain the powers and privileges of the presidency.
Consider a key reason he ran in 2024: the desire to elude his criminal cases. That strategy worked. The two federal cases against him had to be shut down after his victory due to the Justice Department’s longstanding position that a sitting president cannot be prosecuted. His election further doomed the already faltering case against him in Georgia as well. And in the New York hush money case, the only one of the four to reach trial and result in a conviction, Trump’s victory ensured that he got away with a sentence of “unconditional discharge” — even less than a slap on the wrist.
Still, Trump may not be entirely free of all his legal problems at the end of his second term. When special counsel Jack Smith reluctantly dismissed his federal charges against Trump last month, he explicitly reserved the ability for a future Justice Department to revive and refile the charges after Trump leaves office. If a Democrat seems well positioned to win the 2028 election, Trump may fear that those charges might come back to life.
And who knows what Trump might do in the next four years that could trigger new criminal liability? The Supreme Court’s sweeping immunity decision last year would be an obstacle to charging him for anything he does while president, but it wouldn’t be an insurmountable one. If there are serious calls to prosecute Trump again after his second term, it is not hard to imagine him concluding that the best way to stave off those efforts is to simply remain president.
Aside from using the office as a legal force field, Trump may be propelled by another, more basic motive: raw power. This is the raison d’etre for autocratically minded leaders around the world, especially those who erode democratic institutions and engage in quasi-messianic rhetoric.
“Presidents tend to like their jobs, and there have been many attempts for them to overstay,” says Mila Versteeg, a law professor at the University of Virginia.
Versteeg co-authored a 2020 study that examined 234 heads of state in 106 countries in the 21st century. She found that one-third of them sought to circumvent legally imposed term limits. Many of them succeeded — typically not by directly disobeying the law, but rather by exploiting gaps and weaknesses in their constitutional systems or by convincing meek courts to bless their consolidation of power.
Recep Tayyip Erdogan did it in Turkey. Daniel Ortega did it in Nicaragua. Vladimir Putin did it in Russia. The list goes on and on, including leaders whom Trump admires.
“In the countries where this has happened, the rule of law is much weaker than in the United States,” Versteeg says. “But we shouldn’t dismiss it as impossible or unimaginable. It has happened around the world.”
read it all at
https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/ ... m-00200239
