Ruminations on Trump’s third term (Part I) |
Donald Trump would want a third and a fourth, fifth or even sixth term as president if mortality and the Constitution didn't prevent it (although the latter hardly computes in his thinking).
Because his primary concern has always been attracting attention and basking in the adulation of his followers, the most implausible scenario in politics is Trump going quietly into retirement, spending his post-presidential years hanging out on the golf course and erecting gaudy statues of himself at his presidential library.
Trump being Trump, he might therefore concoct some cockamamie legal theory or fake "state of emergency" to try to run again in two years, even if the straightforward language of the 22nd Amendment requires him to settle for the role of GOP kingmaker instead of more time as king.
He will, either way, still exert a greater impact on the 2028 presidential election than any outgoing president in our history, largely because no president in our history has ever dominated a major political party as Trump now dominates his (see the primary results from Indiana for the latest evidence thereof).
Conventional wisdom suggests that the king Trump will seek to make will be either his vice president, JD Vance, or his secretary of state, Marco Rubio. The hunch, though, is that neither Vance nor Rubio will have an easy time of it,........