TRUMP MIGHT GET A THIRD TERM, BUT NOT THIS WAY

This is effective ragebait, but I'm not taking it seriously:



Transcript:

HARRIS FAULKNER (ANCHOR): I had forgotten how much they had thrown at him until just this moment, I mean I hadn't been focused on that in the last 10 days or so. But when you look at it stacked like that, and add onto that Letitia James, the attorney general of New York, who said just this week she plans to go after him. She campaigned on trying to get Trump, what do you make of all of it?

TREY GOWDY (FOX HOST): Keep talking, keep doing it. That's exactly why you got hammered on Tuesday night. Keep doing that. Keep using our justice system as a political weapon and he may, who knows, they may amend the constitution and let him serve a third term. We may get a super majority in the House and the Senate if these coastal elite liberals continue their thought process when it comes to our justice system.

Trump might get a third term, assuming he wants one, but it won't happen through the normal process of holding elections and then amending the Constitution.

A constitutional amendment would need to win the votes of two-thirds of the House (290 members) and two-thirds of the Senate (67 members). In the next Congress, Republicans will have 53 senators and (if all the current leaders win) 223 members of the House.

After that, an amendment would need to be ratified by three-quarters of the states -- 38 states, in other words. After this election, Republicans will have full control of 27 state legislatures. In this election, Trump won 31 states.

(A constitutional convention could also pass amendments, but two-thirds of the states -- a total of 34 -- would need to call for a convention, and any amendments would still have to be ratified by 38 state legislatures.)

Gowdy is imagining a Trump administration so popular and a populace so outraged by attacks on Trump that the party in the White House will massively increase its congressional representation in the midterms. That never happens. Usually the opposite happens. And even if literally every Senate Democrat were to lose in 2026, that would add only 13 new Republicans to the Senate, for a total of 66, one short of the number Republicans would need for this. That would mean Democratic losses in blue Massachusetts, Illinois, Rhode Island, Colorado, New Mexico, Delaware, and Oregon, among other states.

Now, Republicans might find Orbanesque ways to prevent Democrats from ever winning another election. But then we're through the looking glass, and Trump will have other ways to obtain the right to serve a third term. I've always assumed he might argue that he was under investigation throughout his first term, so it shouldn't really count, and I can imagine a Trumpist Supreme Court accepting that argument. I think "SCOTUS pulls a rationalization out of its ass" is more likely than a process that uses legitimate means like the constitutional amendment process. So is "Trump sees a few scattered left-wing protests and suspends elections in 2028."

But does Trump really want to be president for life? Sure, he wants to be out of prison for life. Does the rest of it matter to him? It's likely that he ran again this time primarily to end his legal woes, and also in order not to go out a loser. We might rid ourselves of Trump if the opposition is so neutered that it can't pursue him again, or if the system is more or less intact but we agree not to pursue him. Or he might die or slip into dementia. But I don't think he wants to stay in office if he can have a sweet life as a retiree.