I’ll remind you that @Smapti is the poster who insisted that the Supreme Court and/or Congress would definitely reign in any excesses of Trump, and that Trump couldn’t deport immigrants without extensive due process. So he has no truck with the notion that Donald Trump could, say, fire a bunch of federal employees and dismantle an agency without Congressional action, or demolish the East Wing of the White House in preparation for building an unapproved addition without going through all of the myriad of reviews and approvals that this kind of major construction on a Federal property and US National Parks site would require. You may gauge his perspicaciousness based upon your own knowledge of recent events as you see fit.
I guess you’re not really following the “techbros” of late, but the rage among them is buying/constructing underground bunkers that are stocked with Prepper MegaPack #4 (don’t forget a spare water chip), and their Witch-King Leader Peter Thiel is prophesying literal Biblical Apocalypse to interested crowds.
Well, this is what you and Steve Bannon seem to believe based upon an ‘originalist’ interpretation that ignores the 12th Amendment which states: “But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.” and the 22nd Amendment which makes it clear that former Presidents are ineligable to run as Vice President: “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 the President more than once.”
So credible reading of the Constitution could allow for Donald Trump to be elected Vice President and then advance via some kind of arcane castle maneuver, although there is the argument that he could pawn-promote upward via being inserted somewhere lower in the Presidential line of succession and then convincing everybody above him to resign. But let’s be honest; this kind of political chicanery isn’t really to the taste of a post-06 January 2021 Donald Trump who clearly feels regret that he belatedly followed the direction to talk back the rioters that he previously excited into an insurrectionist furor, and would just claim that any election results that don’t favor him or states who refuse to make him eligible to appear on the ballot are committing fraud, just like all of the other ‘strongman’ leaders like Putin and Orban whom he venerates do.
And if you don’t think that a Republican-dominated Congress would follow him over that cliff then I invite you to look at how they are continuing the longest government shutdown despite broad anger by their constituents to the point that despite all of the partisan gerrymandering and voter suppression the GOP has engaged in over the last quarter century they’re likely going to have to engage in a broad pattern of election denial to stay in power, for which many are already laying the groundwork. And while I still hold out some hope that even for this severely bent Supreme Court a complete abridgment of the 22nd Amendment is a bridge too far, it is also clear that Trump regards the Court as a useful fig leaf that has been disappointingly noncompliant in a handful of embarrassing instances and whose views could be ignored if he just had access to a force of politically-aligned agents who didn’t have the strictures of the UCMJ and habituated to not obeying illegal directions (at least, in public view), hence the press to expand DHS and turn Immigration and Customs Enforcement into a massive paramilitary organization with little external oversight.
Trump definitely intends to serve a third term—he’s not printing and selling hats and shirts with “Trump 2028” as a joke or to promote one of his idiot sons into the role—but it remains to be seen if he’ll even live that long, or if other inside movements will find the impetus to dispense with him and advance directly to full autocracy, treating elections as kabuki suitable for framing or wrapping fish depending on how well it supports their agenda.
Stranger