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Steve Bannon is back in another interview asserting that Trump will get a 3rd term. Like previous times where he's said this, he doesn't really go into too much detail, besides saying they have a plan and they're working on it. I get this is Bannon's schtick lately and he's a political operative and so maybe this is just something he bangs on to rile up the base, but for fun, I want to consider here what the actual plan could be.
Bannon does give away more here than I've seen in other interviews where this has been brought up. I'm going to focus on 2 statements that I think start to give the plan away. When the interviewer says the 22nd Amendment makes it clear that Trump cannot have another term because he's on his 2nd term already:
To me, this is a point in favor of the theory that's been floated around already that their plan relies on some very literal reading of the 22nd Amendment.
Key word: elected. Fairly straightforward, and again, not anything that hasn't been brought up before. Trump runs as some other GOP candidate's VP, they win, and that candidate immediately steps down, making Trump president despite not having been "elected to the office of the President". He's been elected twice, but the 22nd says nothing of being President more than twice. The usual objection to this is that the 12th Amendment prevents this by barring someone who is ineligible for the presidency to be VP, but you can also play word games with this. If you interpret the 12th Amendment's "constitutionally ineligible to the office of President" to just mean "doesn't meet the requirements laid out by Article II", then Trump is still eligible to be President. He's just ineligible to be elected.
But isn't this against the spirit of the 22nd Amendment? Bannon:
It's one thing for Trump to lose the election and then try to still hang on for a 3rd term. But it's another if--given he's able to get on the ballot as VP for 2028, which I think he probably could in enough states--he and his Presidential candidate do actually win. Then the messaging becomes much easier. But how can Bannon be sure enough that the American people will elect Trump in this manner? Simply rig the election. Many say this is too difficult because you'd have to rig so many individual elections, and the states control elections, and if it's easy then why don't we see evidence of it being done in the past, etc. I'll admit this is probably the weakest part of the plan. But if you step back and say, "What steps would be required for this to be doable, and are they doing them?" then there are definitely signs. Dominion was recently bought by a Republican operative, and Trump's people are already signaling they want to mandate election rules for states in time for the midterms in 2026. A Trump DHS appointee who will be in charge of election infrastructure told all 50 states at a recent meeting that they
Even if they can't pull off mandating election rules at the federal level, Trump may have enough state legislatures in the bag that they might just take enabling actions "independently" of any top-down federal enforcement.
Also, you know, he could just actually win legitimately, that's completely possible with the state the Democrats are in right now.
So yeah, this isn't really anything genius. Win the election or rig it so that you do + creatively interpret the 22nd and 12th Amendments. Some quick responses to possible objections:
Lower courts yes, SCOTUS I'm 50/50 on. There are smart people who know the legal world far better than I do who are certain that even the current SCOTUS would rule 9-0 against Trump on this, so maybe. But smart people have been wrong about many matters involving Trump, and SCOTUS has disappointed me before. I don't care that "such-and-such legal scholars have written X about the interpretation of the 22nd/12th Amendment" because at the end of the day it's just SCOTUS that matters. I've seen a theory that SCOTUS has been forgiving to Trump in recent rulings because they know this day is coming, so they want to build up credibility with him for when they inevitably have to rule against him on this. That just seems far too giga-brained for me.
I never really bought the claims that "2020 was the most secure election in history" even though I don't think it was rigged. I just think if someone really tried, they could. Voting machines are repeatedly shown to have security flaws, and I don't think that all the swing counties that matter will use paper ballots and do risk-limiting audits to verify the results.
Maybe, although by 2028 Hegseth may be able to fire enough people and appoint loyalists in their place to make this a non-issue. Someone with deeper knowledge of the US military can comment here. I don't take the "swearing an oath to the Constitution, not the President" thing too seriously, because while I think it may hold at the top, I don't think it holds all the way down the chain of command, and that's what matters if it comes to having to forcibly remove Trump from the Oval Office. However the Courts rule also plays into this, if it can be framed that this whole thing actually isn't violating the Constitution.
Congress continues to abdicate its powers in favor of letting the executive do whatever they want (both parties) and I don't see this changing anytime soon. The only defectors from the GOP we see right now are MTG and Rand Paul. Trump is still going strong despite his age, and I think the people in the MAGA-sphere surrounding him have sunk too much into it to do anything other than milk it until he dies in office. I've completely given up hope that anybody in the White House or Congress will take a principled stance on this. Democrats will continue to be very concerned and maybe organize a No Kings march to no effect.
The number of moving parts on this are insane. Even if you could technically do this, there’s huge problems of coordination, defection, etc. that you can’t get rid of.
If the guy actually elected refuses to step down what plausible mechanism does anyone have to force him to go along? I’m gonna go out on a limb and say that a contract specifying that person X is to run for president in place of Trump who can not be elected and step down is likely to be unenforceable. So Marco Rubio runs for president saying he’s going to resign and Trump will be the real president. He doesn’t. What’s the next move?
You also have the related issue of convincing Trump voters that this scheme is the real deal, that Trump will actually be the President and that the other guy is a ringer. That might not work. There’s only the Mel Carnahan senate race where that actually worked and people voted en mass for a candidate they didn’t want to win (he was dead at the time) and even then there was a bit of pushback because the GOP thought this was illegal. And the democrat voters had no assurances of exactly who would fill that seat. Democrats will absolutely push back on a candidate who is running on being a ringer. They would almost certainly sue, they might try to not certify the results, or have alternate slates.
Rigging elections is hard just because so much is happening in local precincts. Even if you have control over the dominion systems, not everyone votes by machine. If you have the machines down, then 2000 votes show up by voting machines, you have a problem. Even having the numbers right, you have to match the exit poll numbers (which you won’t have, as they’re taken after voting begins. You have to be pretty close to the poll’s already released, at least close enough that the media looking at the numbers buy the election results as plausible. You have to pay attention to down ballot races and issues as a wide discrepancy between the numbers for president and the numbers for senators, representatives, ballot issues etc. would raise eyebrows. You also have to have the final numbers seem random enough that statisticians are okay with the results.
I don’t think anything like this is plausible, but watching someone try to do it and fail would be pretty wild.
All true, and that doesn't even begin to touch the strategic issues. I don't think the GOP is going to clear the field for Vance or any other candidate, which means a competitive primary, which in turn means that some candidate would have to run as Trump's stooge, which might in and of itself cost that candidate the primary. Or Trump could run Don Jr. or someone as a crypto-stooge, but if they aren't clearing the primary for Vance there's no way in hell Vance or any other credible candidate would step aside so Don Jr. can run as a stand-in. And even if the GOP was on board with the whole scheme, it's still a huge risk. Once Trump is named as the vice presidential nominee, the whole eligibility thing is going to overshadow anything else about the election. There will also be a wave of litigation in every state to keep him off the ballot. What happens if this litigation is successful? If the entire selling point is "Trump will still be president", will voters be willing to back a stooge replacement on his own? If the outcome is that he isn't on the ballot in Pennsylvania but is everywhere else, do you find a replacement? What if the Supreme Court rules him ineligible at the worst possible moment? What if the GOP goes along with the scheme and Trump stays on the ballot in all states, but voters are so disgusted with the GOP that he loses in a landslide and the Democrats win large majorities in both houses? And sitting Republicans are primaried out next go around because of it?
There's been a lot of discussion on here in the past about why Trump always seems to outperform his poll numbers, and the most popular explanation is a "shy Tory" effect, but I think it has more to do with what I call the "Trump Constant". One of the big stories about Trump when he first entered politics was his appeal to disaffected people who normally wouldn't vote. Since they're on the margins of political discourse they don't participate in polls and they don't vote in elections unless Trump is involved, though they will vote Republican down ballot if asked to. These are the people who started flying Trump 2028 flags in January and don't really give a shit about the Constitution, or decorum, or any of the other things that Trump seems to have a disregard for.
I don't mean to toot my own horn, because this idea hadn't crystalized yet at the time, but I more or less predicted Ron Desantis's downfall when he was the toast of the "smart set" of the Republican party and of a lot of people on this board. If you remember, in early 2022 Trump's viability going forward was in question after the election nonsense and January 6, and Desantis was trying to portray himself as the future of the party. But there were still a ton of people doing MAGA. He was trying to walk a tightrope where he'd keep his distance from Trump without openly criticizing him. At the time I argued that this would only work if Trump declined to seek reelection, but that he painted himself into a corner because his unwillingness to cozy up to Trump and his image at a fighter meant that he couldn't just not run and yield the nomination. But if he ran he couldn't directly criticize Trump either, and I predicted that his campaign would turn into an incoherent mess, which is exactly what happened.
But when I made this argument to bona-fide Republicans, they dismissed it, and kept pushing the Desantis line. If the "Trump Constant" had been a theory at the time, the media and everyone else wouldn't have been so bullish on Trump, because it would have been clear that Jesus Christ himself wouldn't get the same boost Trump got, especially in a primary. He was so far ahead at the outset that he didn't even bother to debate, and he was so untouchable that none of his opponents save Christie would even dare criticize him. It was the stupidest primary election in history. The theory also explains why the GOP underperformed in 2022; by that time pollsters were making adjustments to account for the "shy Tory" effect or whatever, but they misapplied it since Trump wasn't on the ballot. Normal polling would have predicted the modest GOP pickups. It explains why Conor Lamb ended up beating "Trump before Trump" Rick Saccone (nice guy; I voted for him when he represented my district in the state house) in a District that was Trump +18. It explains why polling in 2016 and 2020 was so awful.
And it explains all this third term nonsense. Trump is convinced that the "Trump Constant" represents the majority of voters. In the past, Trump has convinced the GOP to go along with ideas that would have seemed unthinkable a few months prior. And thus far, he's proven that there are no political consequences for doing so. So it stands to reason that he might be willing to give this a try. But he has to remember that he's not invincible. He's never won as an incumbent, and for all the upheaval of 2020, it was nowhere near the level it would be if he was blatantly trying to circumvent the constitution to retain his hold on power. People in the GOP who would say that this is a bridge too far may ultimately backtrack if this nonsense becomes a reality, but Trump's only holds the office based on a margin of a few points in a few states. It doesn't take much for things to tip back in the other direction, and if he loses he will be done for good, and there's no way he is making a comeback at 86. I don't think he'll seriously pursue a third term, but I wouldn't entirely be surprised if he did.
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