I’ll say up front, this is mostly a thought experiment. A musing. Do I really think this will happen? S**t, I don’t know. I hope not.

But I think it would be better if Trump’s detractors began planning for it, rather than assume a level of stability that doesn’t really exist anymore in our government. If we’ve learned anything from recent history it’s that the American system depends on good faith participants acting in concert to uphold it.

Does anyone really think we have that right now?

I’m not an historian, a lawyer, a politician, or even all that smart. I’m just a snarky writer that a handful of readers think is funny. I’m a jumped up shitposter, basically.

And I’m here to spoil your Monday. Or, if you like Donald Trump, maybe I’m here to make it.

You can count me among the small cadre of commentators who think the Signal-gate thing was largely a distraction. For those just joining us, I’m discussing the recent scandal in which Atlantic editor, Jeffrey Goldberg, was accidentally added to a chat thread in which some of our government’s most powerful military and intelligence personalities were discussing an imminent strike on Yemen.

Yes, obviously, it’s funny that high level government functionaries included a journalist in their deliberations over war plans, even if I don’t think the war plans themselves were especially amusing. (In my view, if we’re going to be isolationists, let’s be isolationists. If we’re not going to let Ukraine drag us into a conflict, we shouldn’t be letting Israel do it either.)

But they left me off the Signal chat, so I didn’t get to weigh in 🙁

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I also thought the lack of marching orders was funny. And interesting. Trumpers seemed to fall into three camps, at a time when they all should have been bunkering down in one:

1) Goldberg is a traitor who leaked classified intel!

2) It’s no big deal because no classified intel was leaked!

3) It was a psy-op; they included Goldberg intentionally, duh!

Very, very quickly, I’ll run down why each of these is bull pucky, but then I want to move on, because Signal-gate isn’t really today’s focus. In reverse order:

3) Sure, okay, I’ll buy the targeted leak angle. But if that’s what they were doing, they’d have done it such that they didn’t all come out of it looking like idiots. There’s really no percentage in looking like an idiot, especially when you’re trying to project enough strength and mettle to scare the Houthis into backing off Red Sea shipping lanes.

2) Yes, it’s a big deal, and yes, the intel was classified, whatever b******t excuse they’re spinning now. Pete Hegseth made clear that they had a high-level target in sight, and this was before the strike was carried out. If you’re a high-level Houthi target, you probably know you are. So if Jeffrey Goldberg goes to print, and you see it, you might think, “now would be a good time to go hang out somewhere else for a few hours.” If something like this had happened under Obama or Biden, does anyone seriously think all these Republicans would be parsing the meaning of the word “classified?”

1) This one…actually, maybe. As in, the administration could absolutely go after Goldberg for printing this. I think they probably will. Doesn’t make it fair or right, and doesn’t make their case any less bogus, but since “he’s a traitor!” is something they can manifest into accuracy, it would be foolish to dismiss this possibility.

And this is a good segue into what I actually want us to be talking about right now. Because even Trump’s angriest critics still don’t understand the reality through which they’re living right now. If you haven’t spent significant time in an authoritarian state, you might be forgiven for looking at the American landscape right now and thinking, “Golly, we are getting dangerously close to losing our democracy…”

Oh, my sweet, summer babies. Your democracy is already gone.

Signal-gate is out of the headlines. At the time of this writing, neither the New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, nor the Washington Post has a top story about it. Nobody cares anymore. Of course they don’t. It’s boring. Trump’s not interested, the guys who did it aren’t sorry, nobody’s going to resign or be punished over it, so what is there to report?

This is how it works with dictators. When you assume full power, you assume full responsibility. When that becomes embarrassing, like when there’s been an obvious screw up, you can either make somebody fall on their sword, or you can just give everyone the finger and move on.

Pete Hegseth was unlikely to be made to take one for the team. His appointment to SecDef was too controversial. Even though Trump has never been shy about firing those who displease him, for him to admit so soon that he made a mistake with Hegseth would weaken him. He doesn’t want to do that, he doesn’t have to do that, so he’s just…not going to do that.

Power means never having to say you’re sorry.

When Trump says he’s not joking about a third term, it’s because he’s not joking. He’s going to do it. He’ll serve for life. Democrats will be very angry about it. Some Republicans too, probably. They’ll yell and scream and pull their hair and they’ll make lots of threats. But they won’t stop him. They don’t have the determination. He does.

He thinks, credibly, that if he ever leaves office, he’ll get thrown in jail. Those are the stakes for him. How about for you? Are you willing to spend your life in jail to get him out of power? I suspect you’re not really. And I suspect he’s counting on that.

One of the reasons the 20th Century was such a shitshow of war and revolutionary activity is because, just objectively, life sucked quite a bit more back then.

There was very little air conditioning, for one thing. It was technically invented in 1902, but didn’t become common until the mid-century. In Europe, a lot of people still don’t have it. So people were uncomfortable a lot of the time. Add to that the heavy, scratchy clothing everyone wore, no washing machines, and limited choice in detergents or fabric softeners and people would have been itchy and smelly to a much higher degree than is common today.

There was no Netflix either. In fact, there was no color TV of any kind for most people until well into the 60s. You couldn’t order Thai food to your door. You probably couldn’t order Thai food at all unless you lived in Thailand. Social mores were much more rigid, so you probably weren’t out dating a lot or otherwise having much fun. You certainly wouldn’t have had apps to help you do it, which is another thing: no internet! Your world would have been comparatively quite small, especially if you didn’t live near a library.

I am really not being facetious. We live in a time of plenty. Of impossible abundance and comfort. Relative to our ancestors, we have it uh-mazing, and we know it. We’re all basically Caesar now.

So when you weigh the idea of forfeiting all that (by going to jail forever or dying) in service of trying (probably fruitlessly) to depose some a*****e grifter who has quite a bit more to lose than you, by virtue of his having quite a bit more to begin with, it’s hard for me to take seriously the idea that many will actually risk it all to stop this guy. Much more likely, he’ll f**k around, he won’t find out, and he’ll die of old age in a decade or two in the Lincoln Bedroom, at which point, Don Jr. or Eric will take over, or if we’re very, very lucky, Ivanka.

But that’s it, guys. That’s the future. That’s how this plays out.

If it sounds like I don’t care, that’s not quite true. I’ve just accepted it. It’s like snow. I’ve never understood why people complain about the snow. If you complain, you have exactly the same amount of snow, you’re just sore over it, when you could be out skiing or making snow angels.

If you want to keep letting Donald Trump live rent-free in your head though, be my guest. I evicted the prick, and it was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Anyway, as promised, here’s how Trump will make it work. Here’s how he’ll stay when you want him to go.

I should note again here that I am not a legal or constitutional scholar. If you are, and you think I’m full of it, please say so in the comments. I’d love to be proved wrong.

But I don’t really think case law, precedent, or textual originalism matter here. This administration has already made clear that they don’t care what any court says anyway, which means that however legally wrong I am, or Trump is, we’re still right back where we started; he’s not leaving until he’s made to leave, and nobody’s really going to make him leave.

Anyway the *two terms of four years each* standard comes from two, different places in the US Constitution.

Article II, Section I says the following:

“He shall hold his Office during the Term of four Years…”

And the 22nd Amendment says:

“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice…”

Article II says more than that, of course. So does the 22nd Amendment. But none of what else is said in either passage is germane to the question of how much time an individual can spend as President of the United States.

And that’s it. Those 25 fragile words are all we have to give us the idea that an individual (strictly speaking, a man; Article II either says “person,” or uses he/him pronouns) can only hang out in the Oval Office for 8 years.*

*Actually, that’s not quite right. A person could do just under 10 years and still be in compliance with 22. If they served less than two years of a term to which somebody else was elected, they’d still be eligible to run twice more.

But do you really think a determined, audacious autocrat couldn’t fiddle with those 25 words to argue that they say something other than what we think they say? To buy him some more time?

Circumventing 22 would be the easy part. It only says Trump can’t be *elected* more than twice. But he doesn’t need to get elected again if he never leaves office.

And the four years thing from Article II? Psh.

“I interpret this as meaning, ‘a Term of four years at least’ or ‘four years or more’ or ‘four years to start with.’”

Either a friendly court says yes to that, or it says no and he ignores it. Whatever. It’s all she wrote. The 20th Amendment says the terms need to begin and end on January 20th, but it says nothing about their length.

The courts move slowly. And they do not have the US military at their command to enforce their will. If the executive chooses not to act in good faith, there are serious limits to what can be done about it.

The no election thing would definitely be a sticking point, but ultimately possible to overcome. Trump’s got the Republican party captured. Nobody in it is remotely strong enough to stand up to him. If he tells them they’re not holding a presidential primary, they’re not holding a presidential primary.

The Democrats still will, of course. But with no opponent, and no buy-in from Republicans, they’ll look tough for a day, defiant for a week, and ridiculous for the rest of the season. At a certain point, the political and media class will accept that there isn’t really going to be a general election for president, and they’ll stop covering the Democrats’ nominating process with any seriousness.

Trump will announce well in advance his intention to ignore any electoral college result, or he’ll f**k with the electors themselves, or he’ll coopt red state secretaries of state into refusing to certify. Maybe he’ll do all of the above, and maybe he’ll find some novel way to approach this that I haven’t thought of. Doesn’t much matter in the end because we arrive at the same place: he digs his heels in, we don’t stop him, and he gets to stay on as president.

Oh, and don’t underestimate the Overton Window. Trump is already talking about this, and he’s only been back in office for two months. By the time it’s general election season again, this discourse will have been 100% “normalized” (to borrow the left’s favorite/most toothless word). We’ll see the train coming from a mile down the tracks and there won’t be one, damn thing we can do to stop the crash.

Hey, maybe I’m wrong! It’s happened before, like in this post where I argued that DOGE would be nothing to write home about. That piece aged like discount bread, and maybe this one will too. I don’t have a crystal ball, I just read the tea leaves like the rest of you, and this is what I see in them.

However... The left has been wrong about a great many things over the last 10 years, but Trump’s dictatorial tendencies has not been one of them. He is exactly who, and what, they think he is.

I’ve been taking some flack lately from fellow lefties about how I’m always beating on them, and not spending enough time going after Trump. The reason for that is that with such a useless and loathsome opposition in the Democrats, Trump is going to be able to do most of what he wants without meaningful pushback. My bet (and his) is that folks will tolerate even the destruction of American democracy as long as they never have to listen to woke people again.

What are a few thousand deported exchange students if it’s okay to say “that’s gay” and “r*tarded” again? Basically, either we get our house in order or we lose the keys to it altogether. I’m trying - I promise - to help us get it together.

There is still time to prevent this outcome. That I don’t think it will be prevented, isn’t to say its prevention is beyond the realm of possibility. Trump could, a bit like last time, become very unpopular. That would change things. Another, more popular Republican - or even, if God wills it, a Democrat - could rise up in his place.

But I think - and I’m kind of, maybe serious - that this is the road we’re on right now. And it leads to Trump 4 Life. Cry about it if you need to, but crying isn’t going to change anything.

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