He’s Not Kidding
Seriously. How many times do we have to wonder whether or not he’s joking? How many times do we have to look at his repeated “jokes” about running for a third term and assume that he’s not actually going to do it?
Put another way, how long do we need to look at the evidence that’s staring us all in the face, like we’re all deer in headlights, and still insist that he can’t possibly get away with that? Honestly, he’s done so many things he “couldn’t” do - that didn’t stop him from doing it!
The “inciting incident” for this article, if you will, was the news that President Donald Trump (yuck) has begun selling merchandise with language on it suggesting that he’ll run for a third term as President of the United States. This is unconstitutional by any reasonable reading of the 22nd Amendment.
Let’s look at the language of that amendment: No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of President more than once.
A “Trump 2028” shirt from Trump’s official online store.
Trump has already been elected twice, in 2016 and 2024. As sickening as it is that Grover Cleveland is no longer alone in serving two non-consecutive terms, that’s just how it is. But the Constitution is pretty clear that he can’t be elected again.
That’s a very important distinction, though: Maybe he can’t be elected to a third term, but nowhere in the amendment does it state that he can’t run again. And if he’s running, there’s always a chance he can be elected. A very good chance, in fact, given that he’s Teflon Don.
Of course, Trump is currently ineligible to be President. The Fourteenth Amendment states that anyone who has incited an insurrection against the United States cannot run for President. But the Supreme Court didn’t care - those Republican Injustices (and yes, we should call them “Republicans” rather than “conservatives”) ruled against Colorado when they tried to remove him from the ballot for that reason. And of course, they later ruled in Trump v. United States that Trump specifically was above the law for “official acts.”
Seriously, if a future Democratic President (not that we’re likely to have a future Democratic President) tried to jail political opponents and pass sweeping progressive executive orders to get around Congress, do you think the Supreme Court would be okay with it? Of course they wouldn’t.
Here’s how it goes: If the President is a Republican, anything is an “official act”, even if it’s something absolutely criminal like invading Canada or building concentration camps. The latter has technically already happened. But if the President is a Democrat, then they can’t so much as wear a tan suit without violating the law.
And that’s before the whole matter of Trump openly defying his own Supreme Court. But at this point, as much as I hate Trump, I have no sympathy for Chief Injustice Roberts when he complains about how his orders aren’t being followed. He had an opportunity to make sure Donald Trump would not return to power, and he not only dropped the ball, he threw it away!
So can Trump run for a third term? Yes. And I truly believe that if he runs for a third term (which elected Republicans want him to do since he’s a giant turnout machine for the GOP), he will be elected a third time. Here’s how it’s going to go.
Trump is going to announce his 2028 campaign right after the 2026 midterms. Of course, this will only be his official announcement, because it’s been clear to everyone with a functioning brain (which excludes half the country) that he’s been running for a third term since the 2024 election.
Democrats will write strongly-worded letters, and Susan Collins (if she’s still a Senator, which I firmly believe she will be because Maine voters are that stupid) will say she’s “concerned” but do nothing to act on that concern. Seriously, that’s how it goes with her - I even have a Susan Collins T-shirt saying “often disappointed, always disappointing”. I’m not kidding.
Ultimately, though, Democrats will not have the power to stop Trump even if they win the House and Senate. Remember that very little of Trump 47’s agenda has actually been voted on by Congress. They don’t matter, and therefore neither do the midterms really matter. Sure, Democrats can order investigations, but what would the investigations really tell us? We all know Trump’s a fascist - we either don’t care or don’t need to be convinced of that.
When Trump files to run, Democratic-controlled states will try to remove him from the ballot. This time, they would seem to have a very strong case against an argument that “two terms means three terms”, or at least that the 22nd Amendment only refers to consecutive terms.
Yes, a Supreme Court ruling that Trump can be elected for a third term would be a flagrant violation of the Constitution. But so was their ruling that he could be on the ballot in 2024 after January 6. It’s not like the difference is between covertly stealing cookies and getting away with murder.
I think it’s likely that the six (or more) Republican Injustices on the Supreme Court will rule that Trump can run for a third term, he just can’t be elected for a third term. You and I might wonder what the point of running is if you can’t be elected, but that’s beside the point. The Republican Party doesn’t care about logic, and neither do American swing voters.
Now, given the state this country is likely to be in by 2028, it might seem unlikely that Trump would win the 2028 election. Surely the buyer’s remorse will have set in by then, right?
But I’m not convinced he’d lose. Even with the economy in freefall in 2020 and thousands of Americans dying a day from COVID-19, Trump just barely lost to Joe Biden. And he didn’t have nearly as much power to challenge the results then as he does now. His Republican allies are far more prepared to steal the 2028 election than they were to steal the 2020 election.
More to the point, Trump is a turnout machine. GOP voters are mindless zombies at this point who will turn out whenever he’s on the ballot. If they had to, they’d crawl naked over broken glass in subzero weather just to fill in that bubble. Sure, people might be sick of him by 2028, but I thought they’d be sick of him in 2024 - apparently not. Last year, there were more of them than there were of us. That’s what matters in an election.
If you put a gun to my head, I do believe Trump would win the 2028 election, in which case he doesn’t need to steal it. At that point, the Supreme Court isn’t going to step in. They’ll just say there was nothing we could do just like centrist Democrats often did during Joe Biden’s presidency.
Some people say that Trump’s mind is going and that he’ll be in no state to run for “threelection” in 2028. But I don’t see it. He lost a lot of weight during his 2024 campaign, and he has the best medical care in the world. And he’s always sounded rambling; that doesn’t mean he has dementia. If anything, given our luck, he’ll probably live to be 100 and never relinquish power until he dies. And even then, Republicans will probably prop him up like that movie Weekend at Bernie’s.
We will never be rid of the Trump dynasty. The sooner we accept that…well, I wouldn’t say the better. But it’ll be easier to deal with it if we know it’s coming.
