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Steve Bannon Floats Bonkers Theory for Trump to Rule Forever

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Donald Trump hasn’t yet begun his second term, but his allies are already setting the stage for a third administrative run under the president-elect.

Speaking at the New York Young Republican Club on Sunday, War Room podcast host and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon suggested that conservatives should rally to keep the MAGA leader in power via a supposed loophole in the U.S. Constitution.

“Donald John Trump is going to raise his hand on the King James Bible and take the oath of office, his third victory and his second term,” Bannon said at the club’s annual gala.

“And the viceroy Mike Davis tells me, since it doesn’t actually say consecutive, that, I don’t know, maybe we do it again in ’28?” Bannon continued, referring to one of Trump’s former attorney general hopefuls. “Are you guys down for that? Trump ’28?”

It’s not even the first time this year that conservative figureheads have argued in favor of violating the Constitution to upgrade Trump’s authoritarian power.

The Twenty-Second Amendment, which was ratified in 1951, states that “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.” Congress pushed for the term limit after President Franklin D. Roosevelt served three terms through World War II, fearing future abuses of power.

Only one clear exception exists for a person to serve more than two terms: a vice president who claims the Oval Office through succession after the death or resignation of a president could go on for another two terms, if and only if their initial time at the top of the executive branch lasted less than two years.

But in April, a feature story in The American Conservative flat-out advocated for the total repeal of the Twenty-Second Amendment, arguing that the country should override the shackles of the two-term limit on the basis that the authors of the amendment couldn’t have predicted the allure of a far-right candidate with a frenetic base.

“If, by 2028, voters feel Trump has done a poor job, they can pick another candidate; but if they feel he has delivered on his promises, why should they be denied the freedom to choose him once more?” American Conservative contributor Peter Tonguette wrote at the time.

Next up on Donald Trump’s lengthy Executive Office to-do list: Stop the clock.

“The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Friday. “Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.

His promise would make Standard Time, which we are currently in and which people overwhelmingly hate due to the increased darkness, permanent.

Proponents for Daylight Saving Time argue that the country uses less energy by extending the long summer sun an hour later into the evening. That was the reason behind Congress’s opt-in to Daylight Saving Time during World War I and World War II, according to Seize the Daylight author David Prerau.

That rationale hasn’t exactly held up—a 2008 study by the Department of Energy found that the clock switch saves a minuscule amount on the country’s annual energy usage—approximately 0.03 percent—while another study that same year out of the University of California-Santa Barbara suggested that Daylight Saving Time could actually cost the country more than not switching the clocks at all. Still, the majority of Americans want to make it permanent.

Trump’s sudden rejection of Daylight Saving Time is a near-total reversal of where he stood on the issue in 2019.

“Making Daylight Saving Time permanent is O.K. with me!” Trump wrote at the time.

But you don’t have to search far to figure out why Trump might have changed his mind. Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has spent a considerable amount of time at Trump’s side in recent months, has been a vocal opponent of the time change. Earlier this month, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the other co-chair of Trump’s not-yet-real nongovernmental commission—the Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE—voiced their support for abolishing Daylight Savings Time.

“Looks like the people want to abolish the annoying time changes!” Musk responded to an X poll indicating that the site’s users were no longer in favor of the back-and-forth.

“It’s inefficient & easy to change,” Ramaswamy responded.

Of course, any concrete change to the country’s official clock would have to pass through Congress—though the increasingly MAGA complicit Republican Party would be in for a rude awakening if it approved the “permanent” jump. America last tried this experiment in 1974, when officials discovered that the only thing less popular than permanent Daylight Saving Time was ending it, with support for the permanent switch falling from 79 percent to just 42 percent within three months, The New York Times reported that year.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the daytime television host Donald Trump has picked to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, may have a direct financial stake in three companies that would do business with the agency he intends to run.

A review of Oz’s 2022 tax disclosure by Accountable.US revealed that the Trump ally owned up to $26 million stake in Sharecare, a digital health company co-founded by Oz that operates CareLinx, the “exclusive in-home care supplemental benefit program” used by 1.5 million Medicare Advantage enrollees. The company went private in 2024, so it’s unknown whether Oz still owns a stake in the company.

Novo Nordisk, which produces Ozempic and Wegovy among other drugs, is also a client of Sharecare. As head of CMS, Oz has considerable impact on the pharmaceutical industry—but with business ties like these, it’s equally likely that these drug companies could have a profound impact on him.

Oz’s transition team spokesperson, Nick Clemens, told USA Today Friday that Oz had sold off his stake in Sharecare, but did not speak to the other stocks Oz owned with ties to the insurance industry.

In 2022, Oz also owned a stake valued at between $280,000 and $600,000 in UnitedHealth Group and between $50,000 and $100,000 in CVS Health, both of which provide insurance plans for roughly 41 percent of all Medicare Advantage enrollees as of 2024.

Oz also disclosed owning a stake valued at up to $25 million in Amazon and up to $5 million in Microsoft, which operate CMS’s “two........

© New Republic


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