Cenk Uygur tested out the theory that you don’t need to be eligible to get your name on the ballot last year. Didn’t work out for him.
IMHO when you are the leader of your party, test results would differ.
Trump would be denied being on the ticket in blue states, but he doesn’t need their electoral votes.
The answer to the thread question is no. It would be seen as nutty not just by Democrats, but also by most newspaper readers around the world.
Nutty things happen when a major party in your country does not believe its elections are free and fair. The U.S. could not follow the exact same path, but Guinea-Bissau news over the last few days is eye-opening as to possibilities:
Except the terms end at noon eastern time on January 20th. So cancelling the election would make the new Speaker of the House the Acting President.
Elections rarely are cancelled. It is the results that get cancelled.
My other answer to what Saint_Cad writes above is: Not automatically. It requires the military giving the new Speaker the nuclear football.
In other countries, when there is a widespread dispute over election results, it is up to the military to decide who is the head of government. I am not so sure the U.S. would be an outlier here.
Pete Hegseth is busy replacing the top ranks of the U.S. military with men he believes will be Trump loyalists. And some members of Congress, including my House member Chrissy Houlahan, are busy telling the U.S. military that their loyalty needs to be to the Constitution, not Trump. Who is more successful there will determine what happens in the event this administration attempts to cancel either elections or their results.
There’s a procedure in federal law for what happens in that situation and it’s not “the military decides”.
The scenario you’re suggesting wouldn’t be “non-nutty”, it would be a coup, and IMO grounds for any state to declare its secession on the grounds that the Union has been dissolved.
My understanding from the many other threads on this exact subject, is that part of the debate about the 22nd Amendment was about whether it should be “no person…shall be elected” to a third term or the more direct “no person…shall be president”. The latter, more direct, wording was rejected.
Trump is constitutionally eligible under the 12th, as a natural born citizen. It would be a piece of cake for this SCOTUS to find that as an eligible person under the 12th, if he were on the ticket as VP and the then president resigned, Trump would be eligible to take over. He wasn’t elected, he ascended to the position, and the framers of the 22nd specifically wrote in “elected”, and debated its inclusion, so they likely thought about this scenario.
Whether he could find a patsy to run as president and make him VP is another question, but I don’t think that sequence is nutty at all. I don’t know why the writers of the 22nd included “elected”, but they did and that’s a loophole the SCOTUS could drive a truck through.
Reading the Congressional Digest from March 12, 1947, it doesn’t answer the question directly as it was on an amendment to change the definition of a term for the VP serving as President from 1 year to 2 years but it seems there was an issue with a President using the incumbancy factor in order to get re-elected. There were some Senators would have been ok if the terms were non-successive meaning that you could be elected to a third term if the candidate were out of office for at least one term. I suspect that the original idea was that no one could be elected to more than 2 successive terms but that last part got dropped. But they could have accomplished the same thing with serving more than two successive terms so more reading is needed to know why the change.
Even this wouldn’t work on its own. Trump was elected to a 4 year term, not “until the next election”. Without further court rulings (and this would require some beyond pretzel-esque logic), he would cease being Prez on Jan 20th 2029, and Vance would cease being VP, and the presidency would go to the Speaker of the House (or next in line if the Speaker wasn’t eligible).
The history is interesting, but they did want to stop a guy like Trump from doing what he is on and off saying he plans to do in 2028.
There always will be some loophole that could be found. Suppose that there was a federal law saying that any state election official allowing someone on an election ballot whose election would result in a President serving more than ten years will be imprisoned for not less than ten years. The loophole is that the Attorney General can use prosecutorial discretion to not indict.
If prosecutors and judges do not want to enforce the law, they can. Clever people can always find a way to get around the Constitution, such as saying that a clause is not self-executing. The countries that have coups also have a Constitution and laws – people are just finding excuses to ignore them.
Yes, of course it would be a coup. That’s not the question. The question is how Republicans could try to claim that it wasn’t one, in a way that would look superficially sane to someone who doesn’t follow politics much.
The 12th amendment says that no person ineligible to be president shall be elected vice president. The resignation scenarios proposed above all have Trump being elected VP first; but he cannot do that either. So for those scenarios to work someone else would have to be elected VP and then resign so President Loomer could appoint Trump as her VP…and then she’d resign too. This version requires two patsies instead of one, making it even less plausible than the others.
I don’t think “Trump as VP” works at all. I think cancelling elections is more likely. Whether you consider that as “nutty” is up to you. Four years ago I would have. Now I think it’s terrifyingly plausible.
Edit: if you have crossed the “cancelling elections” Rubicon, the fact that your term technically ends in January 2029 is not even going to raise an eyebrow. He just won’t leave. What happens then is…dicey.
Exactly. The question is “non nutty ways Republicans can claim he can run.”
Coup: Not “elected.”
He can technically run for “vice president”, wink wink. Nutty.
He can be elected speaker of the house, and gum up the actual election. Both not running and nutty.
Trump’s excuse that he was so mistreated during the elections that he should be able to run again: not even coherent enough to be nutty.
I think this is the most likely scenario under which he is actually placed on state ballots running for President. I’m not sure that all of the states would actually put him on the ballot since the law is so clear cut. The amendment is so clear cut that the court’s abrogation of their powers would itself be nutty. And it should be mega-nutty to the conservatives who claim that the court is just an objective caller of balls and strikes. But of course their hypocrisy is old news at this point.
But that’s the least nutty option that I can think of so far. It’s still fairly nutty.
IOW, a sufficiently pedantic proceduralist SC could rule “the 22nd wasn’t worded precisely enough to disallow this”?
If the history shows that the writers considered the more restrictive version and rejected it for Elected, it’s not really that much of a stretch.
Nutty? What’s nutty in Trump world? The clown cabinet is batshit crazy. Trump has destroyed the east wing of the White House and started building an impossible ball-room folly on a whim. That’s the norm. So, election meddling isn’t nutty. Trump can ignore the elections and then postpone the result because of a national crisis - like perhaps a cop killing in South Dakota poses a terrorist threat to national security. If that sounds nutty listen to Kash Patels’ version of the National Guard shootings and Trumps’ extension to international immigration.
Trump in 2028 - a walk on. In Trump world nutty is the norm.
If he’s still around in 28, Trump will foment chaos. Then, following his tried and true methods, he will claim that the chaos (which he caused!) makes an election impossible at this time. “We’ll have an election in due course (two weeks?), once the nutty Democrats have come to their senses.”
The fly in his ointment is the midterm election. Little Mike Johnson will do all in his power to support these actions–not recognizing voting results, not seating newly elected Democrats, etc. A Democratic majority in the House will make this ever so more difficult to pull off.
It’s not a nutty scenario; it’s what Trump does.
I don’t get where folks here got the idea of Trump cancelling elections. None of his friends do that.
Take the guy he just pardoned, Juan Orlando Hernández. a former president of Honduras. Under the Honduras constitution, the president is limited to one term. Here is an English translation:
Unlike the U.S. Constitution, a penalty is provided. But Hernandez still ran again in 2017, backed by a compliant Supreme Court, then being reelected in a vote international observers found to be faulty.
I provide this example because Hernandez is in the news today. It would be tedious to come up with more examples, but there are a lot.
I think what’s happening here is this: When I was young (I’m 70), foreign elections were common front page news. Anyone else who read U.S. daily newspapers then should know that dictators almost always steal elections rather than cancel them. But mainstream U.S. news now gives less coverage to foreign elections.
Trump isn’t trying to convince Americans there shouldn’t be elections. He is trying to convince Americans that when Democrats win, they cheated. Nutty, not nutty – I don’t quite know what that word means. I do know that Trump believes in having the election and then stealing it, as they do in many other countries.
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And you can’t possibly see any connection whatsoever between the two?
Why not? He is not being elected President and “eligible to serve” is different than “being elected”. If you are curious about the distinction, there is a post on it here.
How would that work? Is Trump going to arrest all 50 Secretaries of State? Burn down polling places or have ICE deport anyone trying to vote? Give us the details of how they will be cancelled.
Nope. The first time a bill he signs and not the Speaker of the House elected on 3 January 2029, the moment it is enforced there will be a lawsuit. By what logic will the courts ignore the 20th Amendment?