There have been talks and predictions that Trump will extend his presidency beyond 2028…..that is if he makes it that long…..but short of wild predictions is there a way legally that he could extend his rule?

Why yes there is….but to use the term ‘legally’ is a bit of a stretch…..more like a few dirty tricks would be more accurate.

Under the U.S. Constitution’s 22nd Amendment, President-elect Donald Trump will be term-limited after he returns to the White House on January 20, 2025. The 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, states, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

The last U.S. president to serve more than two terms was President Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was elected in a landslide in 1932 and was serving his fourth term when he died in office on April 12, 1945. But the 22nd Amendment has limited post-1940s presidents — from Dwight D. Eisenhower to Ronald Reagan to Barack Obama — to two terms.

In an article published by the conservative website The Bulwark on November 22, however, attorney Berin Szóka lays out some of the tricks that Trump might resort to in the hope of remaining in the White House after January 20, 2029.

One possible trick, Szóka warns, is Trump trying to run for vice-president in 2028 — and another is Trump and his MAGA allies trying to change the rules.

There is a reason there are term limits on the presidency….

The purpose of presidential term limits is to protect democracy and ensure democratic competition. In recent years, however, many African presidents have attempted to amend constitutions to pursue extended mandates. For example, in Kenya, a motion was tabled before the senate in September 2024 to extend the presidential term limit from five years to seven. This sparked furious public debate.

The vast majority of presidential or semi-presidential systems around the world have a presidential term limit. The roughly 16% that do not are not well-functioning democracies, but rather authoritarian or semi-authoritarian systems.

Quite often autocratic presidents extend term limits as part of a strategy to consolidate power. In Venezuela, for instance, Hugo Chavez in 2007 lost a referendum to eliminate presidential term limits. He succeeded on a second attempt in 2009, and remained in power until his death in 2013.

https://phys.org/news/2024-11-presidential-term-limits-democracy-dangerous.html

Do you think that there will be an attempt to make this the imperial presidency?

If so then read this….

Trump has been musing about serving three terms for a long time. In a 2018 fundraiser with donors at Mar-a-Lago, he praised Chinese President XI Jinping for being elected president for life, calling Xi “great,” and suggesting, “Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.” At a campaign rally in Wisconsin in August 2020, he declared: “We are going to win four more years. And then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.”

…

By its terms, the amendment prohibits presidents from being elected more than twice. It is silent as to whether a president can legally assume office more than twice by other means.

The distinction is critical because the hardcore reactionaries who dominate the Supreme Court, where any 22^nd Amendment challenge involving Trump would wind up, consider themselves to be strict “textualists.” This means that they profess to focus on the plain meaning of the words contained in the Constitution, regardless of the practical consequences. As Supreme Court Justice Amy Coney Barrett put it in her October 2020 Senate confirmation hearing: “I interpret the Constitution as a law and … I interpret its text as text, and I understand it to have the meaning that it had at the time people ratified it. So that meaning doesn’t change over time and it’s not up to me to update it or infuse my own policy views into it.”

https://www.alternet.org/22nd-amendment/

According to the Constitution he cannot run again….now is there a possibility that he could try an end run on the Constitution? 

Yes there is for he has been trying ever since his first term…..but will he be successful?

And how many Americans are just going to shrug off what is coming as something to look forward to as days go by?

That is the $64 question.

You wanna weigh in on this?

I Read, I Write, You Know

“lego ergo scribo”