Trump remaining in office after January 2029

Certain commenters at LGM — I don’t know how many but quite a few — routinely claim that Trump is never going to leave the presidency as long as he’s alive.

I’m of two views about these claims. First, I think the odds that Trump can successfully stay in office after January of 2029 are low. Second, I don’t think they’re trivial, and certainly not trivial enough for the threat to be ignored.

How could this happen? The legal mechanisms available are:

(1) Repeal of the 22nd amendment. This isn’t happening.

(2) Attempting to exploit a purported loophole in that amendment, which is that it only says somebody can’t be elected to the presidency more than twice, not that they can’t serve more than twice. So the trick would be to elect Trump as vice president in 2029, and then have the elected “president” immediately resign. The difficulty here is that the 12th amendment says that nobody who is constitutionally ineligible to be president can be vice president. The technical response is that the 12th amendment supposedly doesn’t or shouldn’t include extra forms of constitutional ineligibility, adopted later on. This is a dumb argument in terms of normal rules of legal interpretation but Alito and Thomas would certainly buy it, because they’re utterly immoral and corrupt hacks, but I don’t think you could get five SCOTUS votes for it. But it’s not impossible I suppose. This leaves aside all the practical problems of running a puppet campaign where everybody accepts that the presidential candidate isn’t the real candidate. But again, not impossible.

(3) Some emergency war powers claim where Trump says that we can’t have a 2028 presidential election at all because terrorists, meaning his political opponents, are attempting to overthrow the government (EAIAC). I have no idea how to calculate the odds of Trump doing something like this are, but they aren’t zero, because he’s a lunatic and the Republican party is an utterly supine cult, and as per usual you can’t trust this SCOTUS as far as you can throw it.

(4) The most straightforward thing would be for Trump to simply run for a third term straight up, while declaring that the People demand it, and his close reading of Carl Schmitt reveals that America in 2028 is in a state of exception, where the normal law does not apply. I can see a bunch of red states and electors voting for him, with the SCOTUS declaring that its a political question and therefore not subject to judicial review if a bunch of the Sovereign Several States decide to put forward somebody for the presidency. Odds of this happening: Extremely low but unfortunately not zero, because America 2026. It seems quite improbable that he could actually get 270 electoral votes this way however.

ETA: (5) JMauro mentions a real possibility, which is that he doesn’t run but then simply refuses to leave, on the basis of the claim that the election was rigged. (I can see him doing this even if JD Vance or similar wins. Especially so in fact). Yes this is completely insane but that’s hardly a disqualification under present circumstances.

Add it all up and I don’t think the collective odds of something along these lines happening are good, but they aren’t negligible either. The biggest problem here isn’t really legal but rather psychological: I suspect that Trump is at this point utterly addicted to being president, because it’s literally the only position in the world that can now adequately feed his monstrous narcissism and venality. Once he’s not president permanently — and if he leaves at the end of this term he’s gone for good — nobody is going to give a shit about him any more, and indeed it will turn out that like only seven people ever voted for him. I exaggerate, but not by that much, and I think he at least senses this on some feral level where whatever intelligence he possesses resides. King Leer doesn’t want to be King Lear in other words, not that he would get either reference.

So yeah, it’s something to think about, and prepare for, mainly by demanding that any feints in this direction be met by a resolve to stop something like this from happening by any means necessary. And there will be such feints over the next year or so — of that we can be sure.