President for Life
President for Life
Donald Trump is trying to amass the powers of a king.
By J. Michael Luttig
Excerpt...
The Founders of our nation foresaw a figure like Trump, a demagogue who would ascend to the presidency and refuse to relinquish power to a successor chosen by the American people in a free and fair election. Writing to James Madison from Paris in 1787, Thomas Jefferson warned that such an incumbent, if narrowly defeated, would “pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government.” Were that moment ever to come, the Founders believed, it would mark the demise of the nation that they had conceived, bringing to a calamitous end the greatest experiment in self-government ever attempted by man.
Trump proved in 2021 that he would do anything to remain in the White House. Even after the violence of January 6, his second impeachment, and the conviction and incarceration of scores of his followers, he reiterated his willingness to subvert the 2024 election. That proved unnecessary. Yet since his victory, Trump has again told the American people that he is prepared to do what it takes to remain in power, the Constitution be damned.
In March, Trump refused to rule out a third term, saying that he was “not joking” about the prospect and claiming that “there are methods which you could do it.” He was asked about the idea of Vice President J. D. Vance running for the presidency, getting elected, and then passing the baton back to him. “That’s one,” he said. “But there are others, too.” As he so often does, Trump later claimed that he wasn’t being serious. But also in March, Trump’s ally Steve Bannon said that he is “a firm believer that President Trump will run and win again in 2028,” adding that he and others are working on ways to do it, which would require circumventing the Twenty-Second Amendment. (Bannon later told The Economist: “Trump is gonna be president in ’28, and people just ought to get accommodated with that.” He added, “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is. But there’s a plan.”) In September, after meeting with congressional leaders about the looming government shutdown, Trump posted photographs on Truth Social in which Trump 2028 hats rested prominently on his Oval Office desk. In October, when discussing the possibility of a third term, Trump said, “I would love to do it. I have my best numbers ever.”
Snip...
Today, Trump has vastly greater powers than he did in 2020. He has a willing vice president to preside over the joint session of Congress that will certify (or not) the next election, a second in command who refuses to admit that his boss lost the 2020 election. (Vance has said that he would not have certified the results without asking states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia to submit new slates of electors, a solution he invented to a problem that does not exist—there is no evidence of widespread fraud in those states or any state in 2020.) Trump’s party controls both houses of Congress, and he will surely do everything he can to maintain those majorities. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has paved the way for a third Trump term, as it did for his current term, by essentially granting him absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any crimes he might commit in violation of the Constitution or the laws of the United States.
Continues...
https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2025/12/trump-third-term-authoritarianism/684616/
= new reply since forum marked as read
Trump and his ilk - they live, breathe and die for the Fox News cameras. Mike Johnson has spent the last 40 days rambling on every show on that POS channel like an insane person. Trump only talks to them and does so on a daily basis. They would be literally nothing if they didn't have that shitty network to prop them up and give them free advertising 24 hours a day. 
And two of them are poised to get even bigger stakes once these shitty mega mergers go through. And one of them is one of the richest men in the world - Larry Ellison. He's literally destroying one of the things that once made this country great which was CBS News. Now thanks to Trump and MAGA fascism it's a literal shell of its' former self. And expect it to get worse unless we finally get up and fire these clowns in Congress, in the Senate, and the White House.
Unlike pee-resident Trump, Putin's Puppet.
The loss of the key swing states demonstrated the power of propaganda and the corrupt nature of America’s profit-driven news media. Otherwise, most Americans would have known how Trump not only did all he could to weaken NATO, he hosted Russia’s top spies and rolled out the red carpet for the sons of bitches.
The photo of Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov and dip above was taken by TASS, the official Russian news agency. The US media were not informed about the 2017 visit. We learned about it because the Unhinged Moron himself spread the pic proudly on social media.
I've asked frequently: How many people do you know who’ve seen that picture or the one below, taken on an earlier date in the Oval Office?
“I just fired the head of the FBI. He was crazy, a real nut job," Trump said, according to The Times. "I faced great pressure because of Russia. That's taken off.”
"I'm not under investigation," he added.
Sources:
https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/05/10/527755991/trump-meets-with-russias-lavrov-at-the-white-house-today
https://www.businessinsider.com/trump-nut-job-james-comey-russia-2017-5
Not even professors of law I know have seen those images.
