Trump’s third-term tease is a lame-duck hedge

What do you figure the chances are that President Trump will try to seek a third term as president?

Not the chances that he would win, or serve, or even get on ballots nationwide, but that he will try. How you answer that question about the end of Trump’s second presidency should very much inform how you approach what’s going on in Washington right now.

Our history with Trump certainly suggests that if he is still able to draw breath, we will two years from now at least be discussing whether the 22nd Amendment applies to nonconsecutive terms (it most certainly does) or whether some legal loophole or crisis mitigates its blunt language.

A guy who is simultaneously trying to invalidate his predecessor’s pardons in order to prosecute his own political enemies, end the blanket birthright citizenship written into the post-Civil War 14th Amendment and invoke the same 18th-century law that was the basis for the mass internment of Japanese Americans during World War II seems unlikely to shrug his shoulders at the two-term limit that’s only been on the books since 1951 and say, “Oh, well.”

Again, for the purposes of our present predicament, it doesn’t matter whether you think it would work, just whether that in spring 2027 a potential Trump candidacy is a matter of earnest — or at least ardent — debate.

Let’s also stipulate that on Aug. 14, 2028, Trump will surpass Joe Biden to become the oldest person to ever serve as president, so this question could be obviated by considerations of physical or cognitive health. But assuming whatever decline Trump (who turns 79 in three months) is now experiencing is tolerable and gradual, what else would keep him from trying it, or at least keeping his options open?

Trump’s thirstiest supporters are already seeking to either amend the Constitution or find a loophole through it, so don’t kid yourself and say that Trump is a lame duck in the way his predecessors since Dwight Eisenhower have been. The entire Trump ethos is built around being a credible threat to do anything at any moment, so why would he be willing to spend the last two years of this term under the yoke of the 22nd Amendment? And don’t you dare say the good of his party.

If you grant that there’s a good chance that, at the very least, Trump will be still teasing the possibility of a third term, cast yourself forward to March 2027. The midterm elections concluded, Democratic presidential hopefuls — including those who are today already champing at the bit like California Gov. Gavin Newsom and former Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg — will be in an all-out sprint to suck up to donors, media mavens, and early primary state voters. But what about the Republican side?

Who is running and how they are faring will depend on how successful Trump is between now and then. If Trump’s “flood the zone” approach of simultaneous, sweeping remakings of existing economic policy, foreign policy, executive power and the structure of government end up in the ditch and Republicans get a spanking next year as bad or worse than they did in Trump’s first midterm of 2018, the post-midterm Republican Party would indeed feature some dissenting voices.

But how bad would things have to be before the devoted MAGA voters who stuck with Trump during and after his 2021 disgrace could really turn their backs on him? Barring America losing a war or experiencing a crushing economic depression, one imagines that even the anti-Trump candidates will again be doing the hemming and hawing that made so many of the 2024 versions so ineffective. What’s the world in which the Ron DeSantis or Nikki Haley of the 2028 cycle feels free to disrespect the sitting president?

As the non-MAGA candidates are trying to get their feet under them in March 2027, will they feel free to dismiss Trump’s ruminations or outright assertions that he can run again as deluded piffle? More likely, they would say what many Republicans who knew better said about the 2020 election and subsequent wild constitutional claims from Trump: It’s good that these important questions will be considered by the courts, and we should support the process.

The trouble would be that “the process” would still be months away. The first filing deadlines for presidential primaries won’t fall until the end of 2027. No filing, no case. That would leave the non-Trumps in the same place they were last time: Trying to side with Trump on his legal woes but still somehow be his political opponents.

What about the mega-MAGA candidates? The third term question could quickly become a litmus test for the aspiring heirs to the MAGA crown. What better way for Vice President Vance, Donald Trump Jr. or any other member of the movement to make their bones than to say that not only do they think Trump can run again, but that he must. The position of maximum genuflection would be that if the corrupt and disgusting Supreme Court doesn’t allow the incumbent to run again that they would offer themselves as worthy, if insufficient substitutes for the great man himself.

If Trump can manage to keep even the possibility of a third term alive, he might be able to ice the field of potential MAGA replacements and keep the claimants from other wings of the party in a defensive crouch until it is nearly too late to have the kind of open, robust nominating process a party needs.

It may not matter since history has so many amazing devices for disrupting straight-line projections. But as you watch the way Republicans respond to Trump in 2025, don’t forget about the shadow of 2028. Only your own party can make you a lame duck, so don’t count on the GOP doing so any time soon.

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