Trump isn't joking about serving 3 or more terms
He wouldn't leave power willingly the first time. He won't if he returns to power.
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During Donald Trump’s first term, Republicans dismissed well-founded concerns that he wouldn’t leave office willingly as “silly.” And then January 6 happened.
Trump’s coup attempt wasn’t an aberration. If he returns to power, it’s likely he and his minions will push to abolish the 22nd Amendment and its maximum of two terms for presidents — in fact Project 2025 is already scheming to do just that. And you don’t have to take it from us. Just listen to the man himself.
Last weekend, Trump gave a speech to the NRA where he openly mused about serving three or more terms.
“FDR, 16 years … he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three terms or two terms, you tell me?”
The crowd cheered. (Watch below.)
Trump here, as elsewhere, presents his assault on the Constitution and rule of law as a kind of semi-coherent joke. But looking at his history and plans for the future, his fantasies about making himself ruler for life don’t seem very funny.
Trump loves fantasizing about becoming America’s Putin
After much debate among the founders, presidential terms were originally fixed as four year terms with no limits on reelection. George Washington, the first president, resigned after his second term rather than seeking reelection. The presidents who followed Washington all followed his lead and did not seek a third term.
Over the years there was considerable debate about whether to formalize the two-term norm. The question took on additional urgency when Franklin Roosevelt sought and won a third term in 1940 and then a fourth in 1944 before dying in office in 1945.
Republicans and conservative Southern Democrats were determined that there should never be another FDR, and they managed to pass the 22nd Amendment, which formally imposed a two-term limit. Whether you think that’s good policy or not, Trump’s interest in serving three or more terms has nothing to do with the merits and everything to do with his desire to become America’s Putin.
Trump’s signaled for years that he likes the idea of holding onto the presidency for as long as he can. While he was in office, he floated the idea that he could serve more than two terms semi-regularly. During a July 2019 Turning Point USA conference in DC, for instance, someone yelled out from the crowd, “President for life!” Trump chuckled and replied, “That’s what they’re afraid of, you know.”
Trump kept dreaming of an eternal MAGA rein as the 2020 campaign heated up. In January of that year, during a CNBC interview, Trump mused, “President Xi — president for life, okay? It’s not bad.” In February, immediately after being acquitted in his first impeachment, Trump shared a video which showed campaign posters for a Trump 2044 run — essentially a fantasy of rule by Trump eternal.
By August 2020, Trump came up with a reason he deserved three terms — the Russia investigation. He said during a rally in Wisconsin that he’d win a second term “and then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.”
He did not seem to be joking. (Watch below.)
Of course, no one spied on Trump’s campaign; he was complaining because the investigation into Russian influence on the 2016 election implicated his campaign. In any case, the Constitution doesn’t give presidents a “redo” term if they feel they’ve been treated unfairly. Trump was, as usual, just rummaging around in his backbrain for some garbled excuse to justify his limitless lust for power.
Trump sycophants have picked up the hint and started to lay the “intellectual” groundwork for giving Trump the third (and fourth, and fifth) term he wants. In March, Peter Tonguette at the American Conservative argued that the 22nd Amendment is an “arbitrary restraint on presidents who serve nonconsecutive terms.”
As Lisa Needham pointed out in this newsletter, the American Conservative is a partner of Project 2025, the MAGA blueprint for conservative rule in a second Trump presidency. In that context, Tonguette’s piece isn’t just idle speculation; it’s a statement of intent. And given the fact that the compliant right-wing Supreme Court already ruled that Trump can’t be removed from the ballot for violating one part of the Constitution, we’d be foolish to assume they’ll rein him in if he decides to defy a different part on his path to a lifetime berth in the White House.
Is it a horserace if there’s only one horse?
Trump’s not very subtle signals that he wants to remain in power forever are disturbing. They also fly in the face of political and media norms about how to cover the election horserace.
Generally, horserace stories focus on who will win with the assumption that the horse track in four years, or eight years, will look more or less like the horse track now, in the bare minimum sense that multiple horses will in fact be allowed to run.
You can see the problem in an MSNBC piece this week focusing on the 2028 Republican presidential contest. Republican strategist Susan Del Percio notes that candidates like Ron DeSantis, Nikki Haley, and Chris Sununu are already jostling for position, and that a lot of that jostling involves them trying to figure out how to distinguish themselves from Trump without alienating his base.
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Del Percio’s article is an innocuous piece of fluff with little policy content, written as if there will be a normal Republican primary cycle in 2028. It doesn’t exactly ignore the gassy elephant in the room; it’s all about Trump. But it ignores the fact that the gassy elephant refuses to leave the room. Part of the reason Haley, DeSantis, and Sununu are tiptoeing around Trump is probably because they realize that Trump may well run for president again in 2028 if he’s elected (and perhaps even if he isn’t).
It's not just the Republican horserace that Trump could disrupt. Again, there is inevitable and normal speculation about which Democrats are likely to run for 2028. Predictable names are floated — Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom, Gretchen Whitmer, Raphael Warnock. Pundits analyze their policy positions, their ambitions, their popularity, their tactics.
But again what’s missing from these discussions is the possibility that Trump, if he wins in 2024, will simply run again in 2028. And one thing we know from Trump’s 2020 campaign is that, when he’s in power and running a horserace, he uses his power to try to cripple the other horses. In 2019, Trump attempted to blackmail Ukraine into targeting then-Democratic candidate Joe Biden with (false) charges of corruption. He was impeached for that but not convicted, and as we saw above he used his acquittal in early 2020 to repeatedly “joke” about becoming president for life.
There’s every reason to believe that if Trump returns to power, he would escalate efforts to target his political opponents. He’s said that if elected in November he would have Biden indicted by his MAGA-fied DOJ, and he’s talked openly of getting revenge on his political enemies.
Those political enemies will certainly include Democratic electoral opponents. Given Trump’s 2020 campaign, and his 2024 campaign promises, it seems likelier than not that Trump will use the power of the state to smear, and possibly to falsely charge and prosecute, whichever Democratic candidates seem to pose a political threat.
Trump has shown in the past that he intends to dismantle democracy; he has promised that in the future he will dismantle democracy. Free and fair presidential elections in the US may be coming to an end if he wins in November. Horserace coverage is fundamentally misleading if it fails to make clear that in the near future there may be nothing but rigged horse races.
Americans don’t like dictatorship. Remind them of that.
Trump running in 2028, and 2032, and on and on, MAGA without end, is a terrifying thought — and not just for Democratic partisans. Democratic and Republican strategists have both found that undecided voters are very concerned that Trump would not step down in 2028. It’s a fear that consistently pushes voters towards Biden.
Democrats have so far not focused much attention on the possibility that Trump will never leave office. But maybe they should. Forcing Trump to talk more about his 2028 plans can only discredit him. Voters need to be reminded that the only way to ensure that Trump doesn’t rule for life is to vote him down now, before he gets into position to abolish the horserace, the Constitution, and any vestige of democracy we have left.
That’s it for this week
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Thanks for reading, and have a great weekend.
My first reaction was that Noah was underestimating the massive constitutional barrier to changing the constitution. But he's right: I wouldn't put anything beyond the conservative majority of this Supreme Court.
Who is going to put a stop to this nonsense? It certainly is not a joke and until his followers, sycophants and crazies realize the error of their ways we are in for a wild ride. While Senator Barry Goldwater espoused crazy ideas in 1964 and was seriously trounced in that election year, this is frightfully different. We need to be once and for all rid of this maniac and the vote is the best way to ensure it happens.