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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.
I can't take Bannon saying this to mean anything or indicate anything serious. He's just talking out of his ass from a position of no authority. Furthermore, Trump will be way too old to run next time. Furthermore, if they actually tried to run a strategy like this for any length of time, as opposed to just talking about it, that would push every centrist like me, who doesn't take anything Trump says about himself seriously nor takes anything Trump's detractors say about him seriously, into a realization that Trump is in fact a threat to American democracy. It would prove every leftist correct, that Trump is the worst thing ever, a wannabe dictator, the whole thing. Then Trump would lose in the biggest landslide ever.
Strongly disagree. I think there's probably very few people who aren't already convinced of this that would then become convinced by him trying a 3rd term. He already tried to hang on to power after an election whose results he disagreed with via very legally dubious means. I don't get the reasoning that sees the fake electors plot and concludes "Yeah, now that he attempted that and faced no consequences, won reelection, and has a Supreme Court ruling now saying he can't face any criminal liability for his actions as President, he probably won't try anything like it again".
I certainly would react as @haroldbkny describes. I have argued for 8ish years that Trump is not actually a big deal and people are freaking out over nothing. I thought the Jan 6 riot was a complete nothingburger and I think the "insurrection" talk is coming from a place of fearmongering rather than any actual basis in Trump's actions. If he tried to actually run for a third term, that will show that the left has been right about him the entire time, and he actually is a threat to democratic government in this country. I'll vote for literally anyone the Democrats run against him.
What's your opinion of FDR?
I hate him, though not for the fact that he ran for four terms if that's why you ask. That was legal at the time, so whatever (I am not one who believes that custom should be given serious weight like that). I hate him because he wiped his ass with the constitution and largely destroyed the original vision for this country by centralizing so much power within the federal government, power that it constitutionally could not (and still cannot) have. Only extremely disingenuous motivated reading of the commerce clause (with Wickard v Filburn being the prime example) allowed it, and everything he did under that aegis should be walked back. That won't happen of course, because a strong federal government is actually pretty popular with the masses.
But yeah, in short I think FDR was one of the worst presidents the US ever had.
It would have been better if the New Deal had been implemented with a constitutional amendment; however, the state governments were not capable of responding to the Depression on their own, and had Washington continued to do nothing, the nation would have had little prospect of avoiding a far more blatant rejection of the Constitution, as the desperate masses turned to either a Red or a Brown alternative.
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I agree, but the general consensus does not impress.
I actually think Trump running again would be an extremely bad idea for a number of practical reasons. But more and more, I'm flatly unwilling to engage in the pretense that there's some civic foundation that future norm violations are supposed to be undermining, that even a single stone of those foundations still rests upon another. This perspective doesn't necessarily resolve in endorsement of further violations, but if I'm going to oppose them, I'm going to oppose them for real reasons, not fake ones.
Yeah, I know people rate FDR highly. It's one of the things that lowers my level of hope for this nation: that a president can make his entire policy platform to do blatantly unconstitutional stuff, thoroughly destroy the original social contract on which the nation was founded, and be rated as one of the greatest leaders in the country's history (rather than as one of its greatest villains) as a result. George Lucas was a little on the nose with the Star Wars line "So this is how liberty dies: with thunderous applause", but he also was basically correct imo. When freedom is taken away from a people, it is popular to do so (until it's gone too far and then it's too late to stop it, let alone reverse it).
I'm not saying that Trump is committing the first serious norm violations in our country's history. He isn't. We have been steadily eroding those norms for a century. But I am saying "two wrongs don't make a right", and I'm going to fight Trump just as hard on constitutional principles as I would've fought FDR back in the day had I been alive. Not that it means much, of course - Trump doesn't even know I exist, much less care what I think. But to the extent I can do something if he goes down that road (i.e vote against him, rather than for someone I would prefer), I will.
A century?
People accused George Washington of abusing presidential power.
There has not been a president in history who was not at some point accused of exceeding his authority and violating the Constitution. Granted, some of these accusations were more bad faith and politically motivated than others, but still- I'm not even disagreeing with @FCfromSSC at this point that the Constitution is literal paper, but "norms" have always been a nebulous fuzzy thing manipulated by the politicians of every era. Just as the Supreme Court has always been in a sort of "dialog"/adversarial relationship with Congress and the Executive branch, making rulings as much to uphold their own legitimacy as to interpret the Constitution in some theoretically "objective" way.
There was never a period in American history when the political class was treating the Constitution as a rulebook that could not be deviated from to their own advantage. Some individuals treated it so- even some presidents! But they were not the norm.
To the degree I have been in more-or-less continuous disagreement with FC and other "America is dead" drumbeaters over the years, it's not with the facts before us today but rather whether these facts actually represent a meaningful difference from the past.
Where my own thinking has changed is that I think we may be the generation that sees the bill come due, the inherent instability in the system reach the breaking point, the ruin in the nation exhausted.
At this point, my optimistic hope is that the nation outlives me. Just need to eke out another few decades.
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Do you believe that "Constitutional Principles" protect you or anything you care about now, or will at any point in the forseeable future? Do you perceive your position to be one of enlightened self-interest, or is it more a terminal values thing?
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