We’re back in Julie Principle territory again, unfortunately: “Fish gotta swim, bird’s gotta fly, Trump’s gong to keep saying crazy stuff to make progressives cry…” This is a particularly annoying example. Just as the position of Ethics Alarms is that trusted professionals do not have the luxury of pulling April Fool’s Day hoaxes on the public, it is also unethical for Presidents of the United States to deliberately raise phony issues for public consumption.
The President began raising the possibility of a third term almost from the moment he was elected to his second. It is, of course, impossible. The Constitution forbids it quite unambiguously thanks to the 22nd Amendment, the eventual Congressional reaction to Franklin Roosevelt shattering the unwritten rule, set by our first President, that two elected terms is enough. Over the weekend, Trump said he was “not joking” about there being “methods” to circumvent the two-term limit. No, there really aren’t and never mind that: Trump is 78 years old, not exactly in peak physical condition, and would be 86 at the end of a third term. The real question is whether he can complete this one.
Trump was even sparking speculation about a fantasy race between him and Barack Obama in 2028 for an unconstitutional third term, and a depressing number of morons on social media are taking it seriously. Yes, Dana, that’s your cue…
Here’s what’s happening. I was pondering Trump’s nonsense, and concluded that there are three things going on here, only one of which is substantive:
1. Trump has no self-discipline or self-control, and will blurt out or tweet anything that pops into into the mysterious thing known as his mind. He will always do this. The Julie Principle. Most of the time, the best course is to just ignore such outbursts.
2. He likes making Axis heads explode. It’s only a bit more ethical than teasing puppies. “See? He wants to be dictator for life!” My Facebook friends were flipping out over the most recent third term comments. Of course they were: Trump’s election robbed them of about 30 IQ points each. I have to confess, their distress gives me a tiny bit of satisfaction: the Trump Deranged have set themselves up for this anxiety.
3. Here is the legitimate one: Trump is a lame duck, like all second term Presidents. It is almost a cliché now that two-term Presidents have disappointing or outright disastrous second terms, and the fact that everyone knows that there will be no lasting consequences of foiling a second term POTUS after his last four years are complete is regarded as a prime reason this has generally been true. Trump, therefore, is trying to bolster his power and ability to drive his agenda by creating doubt about whether he really will be metaphorically toothless and gone for good by January 20, 2029.
Sure enough, the geniuses at the New York Times figured out #3 too. “But his musings — whether based in reality or not — serve a distinct political purpose,” sayeth the Times yesterday afternoon. “They… freeze the field of potential successors who may steal the spotlight from a lame duck — a status dreaded by American presidents, who see their relevance diminish steadily over time.” The Times needed authority to bolster their analysis, although the strategy is rather transparent. “It reads like somebody who doesn’t want to be treated like a lame duck and is throwing it out there right now,” the paper quoted Derek T. Muller, a law professor at the University of Notre Dame and “a scholar in election law” as saying. “It’s really hard to be a lame duck president or to be treated that way, and people are talking to you like your term’s already over.”
“It serves Donald Trump’s public relations to start the bantam rooster crowing that he may serve a third term because it makes him not a lame duck,” Douglas Brinkley, the partisan, Trump-hating hack Presidential historian favored by CNN and MSNBC told the paper for an earlier piece. (That’s some mixed bird metaphor there, Doug.) “It insinuates that he’s one of the greats like Franklin Delano Roosevelt, that the people are demanding another term and, ‘I guess I’ll do it because I’m a patriot.’”
Yeah, I get it. Nonetheless, Trump’s trolling is still irresponsible. It only will convince dumb people, ignorant people, and the Trump Deranged. The President’s third term gaslighting reflects poorly on his seriousness, integrity and intentions no matter how you look at it.
Ethics Alarms 
Used to be when administrations made mistakes they would come out a week later and announce renewed efforts to land on Mars.
Now presidents just troll the opposing side.
The news media knows better. They’re just continuing the same old taking Trump literally strategy they used last time.
After all the speculating on how Obama could get a third term, or perhaps be president for life, Trump taking a crack on the theories is only unprecedented because he’s actually saying things out loud.
However, this could be an instance where we should be playing close attention to what the Trump administration is doing. He could be deliberately goading this topic into the news cycle so that the MSM misses other things he’s quietly handling. Maybe this outrage was to distract from the tariffs that are going in place tomorrow.
I could also add that this speculation lands squarely in the “what’s going on” portion of ethical analysis. If I’m right, and this is an effort to distract the MSM from something else Trump is attempting, this would run contrary to promises of transparency. On the other hand, maybe I’m wrong. Trump hasn’t necessarily been afraid to do everything in the open. If he is simply trolling the Left to see their heads spin, as amusing and full of schadenfreude as it is, it also runs contrary to bringing the country together. Granted, the far Left apparently still needs gobs of public rejection so that it returns to a semblance of sanity, but there are many better ways to go about that. Such as being transparent, being the adult in the room, and showing that the policies the Left hates actually work.
I sure will not vote for any side that disrespects the Constitution. Whether they are teasing or not this is wrong, and a sure way to set up a system that sooner or later down the road all citizens will regret. This would be one step further in the direction of being under U.N. control and laws.
There is something greatly wrong with our system and has been for quite a few years in that we keep electing individuals that their main goal is to keep the people riled up to keep the politicians egos escalated and profits in their families instead of allowing the masses to think intelligently and finding solutions instead of these destructive bandaids for an issue. Those bandaids sooner or later comes ripping off and cause hemorrhaging.
The only possible read I can conjure on this would be that he would step down with more than two years left on his current term and then try to run for a third term. Under the applicable amendment (I am not going to even bother looking it up because the topic itself is almost a complete waste of time), it would be possible for someone to serve as President for 10 years, but I do not know offhand if it would benefit a President who steps down.
What really annoys me is that, since George W. (perhaps excluding Biden), the opposition has fear-mongered that the President (Bush, Obama, Trump) is going to try to run for a third term (I don’t recall it with Clinton), and it always impressed upon me how stupid that person is.
Now, Trump is actually trolling them with that, and there is NOTHING constructive about doing that.
-Jut
“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.”
Interestingly, Teddy Roosevelt held himself to the 22nd’s limits before it was created. He ruled out running in 1908 because he had served most of McKinley’s term, and later regretted it, so he ran in 1912, splitting the GOP and giving Wilson the White House. Historians have said that Teddy was “foolish” to rule out running in 1908 because it made him a lame duck, weakening his first elected term.
Jack, most of the conspiracy theories I’ve seen focus intently on the “no person shall be ELECTED…” That questions whether or not a former president who is ineligible to be elected could instead backdoor into the presidency by some other means. One scenario could be attaining, for example, Speaker of the House, and then having the President and Vice President resign so that he would fleet up to the presidency. Do you have thoughts on these end-arounds (aside from who would willingly go through the process of being elected president only to step aside for someone else)? Are there any constitutional analyses better minds than me have already presented that nullifies these weird attempts?
My only comment would be: They are ridiculous, could never happen except in fevered hypotheticals, and are not worthy of the time it takes to think about them. It would be unethical for anyone to run for President planning to resign, and enough voters would resent it—I would never vote for such a sham candidate—that he or she would surely lose. No individual so weeny-like that he would agree to such a scheme has the necessary character to get a Presidential nomination. Even the worst lackey GOP Congress wouldn’t be so stupid as to elect a fake Speaker—there would be enough principled Reps to ensure his defeat.
The 12th Amendment already prevents an ineligible person from being elected Vice-President. While it is true that there have been two or three persons who have served as President return to serve in Congress, it seems unlikely that anyone who has been President in the modern day would want a lesser position – albeit powerful one – like Speaker of the House.
I would imagine that the SCOTUS, should a former President be up for the position of Speaker, would weigh in that the 12th would also prevent a former President from being anywhere in the line of succession. When it was written, the order of succession had not been established.
Hypotheticals requiring those kind of machinations would they ever present themselves as a possibility, would indicate to me a republic facing far greater problems than procedural sniverly than that.
Kind of like when people ask “well who is 19th in line of succession if the first 18 people are knocked out?”
Well, if we’re asking that question, I’m probably asking questions like “where can I get a steady supply of ammo, I know where there’s fresh water and shelter. How can I get my family safely there.”
Some questions don’t need to be asked because they assume a context that would not be in existence if the question actually has to be answered.
Thanks for posting that. Yes, not elected more than twice.
He could try to run again; he just can’t win.
But, the thing that would really make the TDS sufferers blow-up is to tell them that this term is not legitimate because he was already elected twice, 2016 and 2020. Then, if they show any inkling of believing that, you say, “except he was not really elected in 2016, so he could probably run for the second time in 2028.”
HMMM….could Trump be cunning, conniving, or stupid enough to argue that “elected” means “win the popular vote”? After all, that is what his critics contend. If he throws that at them, it would truly be genius-level trolling, forcing them to admit the legitimacy of 2016 (for their own peace of mind).
I am almost tempted to respond to Facebook hand-wringing with that theory.
-Jut
OK what is going on here? Trump does what he is good at and enjoys doing, namely trolling the left. The left is very trollable right now, and it makes them look ridiculous, and the right wing media is having a lot a fun with it. The goal is keep the Democrats in the current mood at least until the mid-term elections.
As a response to Ryan Harkins about trying to bring the nation together, that is not Trump’s goal as it would not be realistic for Trump to pursue it. The goal should be winning elections and have his agenda implemented. Bringing the nation together will not happen unless the Democrats radically change their philosophy and move back to slightly left of center, ditch woke, stop demonizing everything the Trump administration and the GOP does, and reach across the isle as Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich did in the nineties. There is no hope for the Democrats, unless they move, and they are the first ones to move, back to relevancy.
As for a third term for Trump, two terms are enough for any President, and besides constitutionality it good for both the country and the GOP to have newer and fresher politicians. My impression is that JD Vance would be an excellent nominee for the GOP in 2028. It would also be good to implement term limits for senators and house representatives. What are dinosaurs like Mitch McConnell, Nancy Pelosi et al still doing in the Senate? Just as in business, politics need to see new faces with new ideas and a fresh approach.