Tom Moran: A third term for Trump? Crazy, but revealing.
President Donald Trump told NBC news last weekend that he’s dead serious about serving a third term as president, no matter what that dusty old Constitution says.
He knows he can’t hope to pave the way by amending the Constitution, as one of his bootlickers in the House has proposed. That takes a vote by two-thirds of the Congress, and ratification by at least 38 states. There is nothing on God’s earth that could build that kind of consensus in today’s America, not even apple pie.
But let’s say he finds a way. There is talk that JD Vance could run at the top of the ticket in 2028, with Trump as his vice-president. If that ticket won, the theory goes, Vance could resign, and Trump could resume his place on the throne without being “elected to the office more than twice.”
It’s a whacked-out plan, and would break a bunch of other good rules and norms, but can anyone rule out this Supreme Court offering its blessing? What about a Supreme Court with a few more Trump appointees on board by then?
“A lot of people want me to do it,” Trump told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday. “There are methods which you could do it, as you know.”
Granted, this is delusional stuff. But so was Trump’s demand that Vice President Mike Pence overrule voters after the 2020 election. So are his plans to take over Greenland and Canada. If you’re looking for crazy, we could make a long list after just two months. He could actually try this.
“The biggest mistake of the last eight years is that we somehow failed to give credibility to Donald Trump’s whims and impulses, but we know it’s true,” David Jolly, a former Republican member of Congress, told MSNBC. “January 6 was a perfect example. If he says he’s not ruling it out, then he’s not ruling it out, and we should consider it a constitutional threat.”
Steven Levitsky is a Harvard professor who co-wrote the book “How Democracies Die“ after studying the many cases in which leaders win legitimate elections, then corrode democracy by using the machinery of government to rig the game in their favor. They limit the power of judges or ignore their rulings, they undermine the free press, they change election rules, harass opponents with bogus criminal investigations, and peddle disinformation.
Sound familiar?
Adolf Hitler is the famous case, winning his appointment as chancellor in 1933 only after the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag through free elections. But Levitsky considers the threat of old-school fascism overblown. He worries more about America becoming a fake democracy, as happened in places like Turkey, Hungary, and Venezuela.
“The breakdown in democracy in the United States will not give rise to a classic dictatorship in which elections are a sham and the opposition is locked up, exiled or killed,” he writes in Foreign Affairs magazine. “What lies ahead is … a system in which parties compete in elections but the incumbent’s abuse of power tilts the playing field against the opposition. Most autocracies that have emerged since the end of the Cold War fall into this category.”
Trump is following a playbook. And what scares me is that so many independent players are groveling at his feet, rather than standing on principle. Columbia University has agreed to give him some control over their curriculum on Mideast studies. The Washington Post and Los Angeles Times agreed to kill editorial endorsements of Kamala Harris. Two big law firms just degraded themselves by agreeing spend a combined $140 million on legal work for causes that Trump supports.
And notice that Attorney General Pam Bondi signaled that she won’t investigate the blunder we just witnessed when Trump’s senior national security team spilled plans for the attack on Houthi militants in Yemen on a commercial app hours before it was launched, putting the mission and our pilots in danger. Lower-ranked players might be facing prison time under the Espionage Act, which criminalizes not just intentional leaks, but those showing “gross negligence.”
What worries me most is not the prospect of a third term for Trump. My guess is voters will sour on him long before 2028 anyway. But his comments are revealing about his mindset. The man respects no restraints on his power.
The bigger stress test will come if he defies major court rulings. He’s already testing the limits on a few cases, including the decision to proceed with deportation of what he says are Venezuelan gang members despite a judge’s oral order to stop those flights.
Let’s say he take the next step, and explicitly defies a ruling on a major issue, like his refusal to spend money allocated by Congress on agencies like USAID. If the Court orders him to reverse course, will he obey?
“Judges aren’t allowed to control the executive’s legitimate power,” Vice President JD Vance posted on social media.
Yes, but it’s the judges who get to decide what’s legitimate and what’s not. Vance doesn’t seem to get that. And neither does Trump, who chillingly said, “He who saves his country does not violate any law.”
I expect this crew to make a charge at our democracy. They don’t give a damn.
But the United States is not Turkey, or Hungary, or Venezuela. We have a strong and independent judiciary. We have state governments controlled by the opposition. We have midterm elections, and a free press with strong protections. And as Levitzky notes, Trump’s popularity is limited. “An elected autocrat with 45 percent approval rating is dangerous, but less dangerous than one with 80 percent support,” he writes.
So, its’ game on. This fight is only beginning. And my money is still on democracy.
Moran is a national political columnist for Advance Local and the former editorial page editor/columnist for The Star-Ledger of Newark, N.J. He can be emailed at [email protected].
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