By Nick Catoggio
Monday, October 27, 2025
Politics in 2025 is less an exercise in setting policy
than a psychological experiment into motivated reasoning.
The question of the experiment is this: How much evidence
of the White House’s autocratic ambitions are Americans, especially
Republicans, capable of ignoring or rationalizing to justify their continued
support for the president?
For example, various right-wingers feigned confusion
earlier this month about the “No Kings” rallies across the country. What
exactly were the protesters protesting, they wondered? Where did they get the
idea that Donald Trump presumes himself a king?
Well, in the nine days since those protests were
held, the president slapped a new 10 percent tax on Americans for no better
reason than that he’s mad
about a TV commercial; he’s preparing to go to war with Venezuela without
authorization or even meaningful input from Congress; he’s told people
privately that he’s
effectively the speaker of the House now, insofar as the House still exists
after being out for about a month; he’s pardoned a corrupt Chinese crypto mogul
who helped
enrich him and the Trump family; he’s thinking of looting nearly
a quarter billion dollars from the U.S. Treasury to reward himself for
beating the rap on various crimes he almost certainly committed; and he
demolished part of the White House so that he could build himself a
ballroom worthy of a proper palace.
As others
have noted, some of Trump’s sins against democracy are so quintessentially
monarchical that they appear in the bill of particulars against George III in
the Declaration of Independence. If you can digest all of that and still end up
scratching your head at what the “No Kings” demonstrators were on about, it’s
not because you don’t understand. It’s because you won’t understand. You’ve
resolved psychologically not to take Trump’s autocratic desires seriously
because doing so would force you to choose between loyalty to your tribe and
loyalty to the Founders’ vision.
The latest iteration of the experiment came this weekend,
when the president was asked about running for a third term and, not for the
first time, declined
to rule it out. A few days earlier, his loyal servant Steve Bannon claimed
in an interview that there’s a
“plan” in motion that will make that feasible and described Trump as an
“instrument of divine will,” which is kingly rhetoric if I’ve ever heard it. If
you’re skeptical that Bannon has an inside track about Trump’s intentions, let
me remind you that he revealed the “stop the steal” playbook before
the 2020 presidential election.
You would think a guy who tried to stay in office
illegally once before might lose the benefit of the doubt as to whether he’d
try again, but tribal Republicans like pollster Patrick Ruffini and radio host
Erick Erickson insist there’s nothing to see here. “It’s a bit. Relax,” Ruffini said
of Trump’s third-term chatter. (Which sounds
familiar.) The president will leave on schedule, Erickson agreed:
“I think this obsession with believing he won’t leave office is bad for people
already struggling with mental health concerns. You are going to be okay. The
country will be okay. The constitution will be okay.”
Could be. If I had to bet my savings on an outcome, I’d
bet that the president’s age and health will leave him in no position to run
even if he wants to. But the blithe assurances from Ruffini and Erickson would
be more comforting if both hadn’t developed amnesia last year about Trump’s
fitness for office after furiously demanding his
impeachment and removal on January 6. (Ruffini greeted his return to office
with one of
the most embarrassing posts in the history of Twitter.) They had a powerful
partisan motive to rehabilitate Donald Trump, so they reasoned,
or “reasoned,” their way into doing so. Now they have a powerful partisan
motive to believe that he surely won’t do the sort of thing they once briefly,
and rightly, despised him for doing.
Maybe they’re right this time. But if you fear that the
president really will try to run for a third term, there’s a powerful argument
in your favor. He gained and then consolidated presidential power by taking
political hostages; given his success with that tactic, why wouldn’t he try it
again one last time in 2028?
Good for Trump.
It doesn’t surprise me that old-school party men like
Ruffini and Erickson are cool to the idea of another Trump candidacy (for now!)
while a burn-it-all-down “Leninist”
like Bannon can hardly wait. The prospect of a third term is useful to the
president and terrible for the GOP.
One virtue of the 2028 blather from Trump’s standpoint is
that it boils
America’s frogs a little longer. He’s trying to desensitize the country to
executive power grabs through sheer repetition, a sort of authoritarian version
of exposure therapy. The more comfortable voters get with the idea of him
challenging some laws and traditional norms, the less resistance he’ll meet in
challenging others. “Strong” presidents test the constitutional limits on their
authority.
Murmuring about defying the 22nd Amendment
reinforces that belief. Already, I think, we’ve reached the point where the
prospect of him running again is less a matter of popular outrage than cause
for excited will-he-won’t-he punditry. The rules shouldn’t apply to Trump
is the president’s most heartfelt belief, and he’s gotten a considerable share
of Americans to buy into it by simply refusing to accept that the rules apply
to him. Barack Obama seeking an illegal third term in 2016 would have drawn
Republican calls for impeachment; Trump seeking an illegal third term is just
an “outsider” refusing to be bound by the rules of a corrupt system.
The other benefit of 2028 speculation is that it spares
Trump from lame-duck status. There should be no duck lamer than an octogenarian
serving out his second term, as any other president in that position would
already face revolts among his congressional allies against the less popular parts
of his agenda. His tariffs, for instance, should be ripe for bipartisan repeal
given the damage they’re doing to the national economy and to certain
red states in particular.
With rare exceptions,
though, there’s no rebellion afoot in Republican ranks. No one wants to get
crosswise with an imperial president who’s already goaded federal prosecutors
into charging his enemies, but they really won’t want to get crosswise
with him if there’s a chance he’ll still be president in 2029. The prospect of
King Donald reigning for years to come, with increasingly autocratic powers
amassed in the White House, means the House and Senate GOP dare not defy him
for the sake of saving their own electoral skins. Members
of the Duma understand that it’s always better to be too loyal to Putin
than not loyal enough.
So “Trump 2028” is good for Trump. But it’s not so good
for Trump’s party.
Bad for the GOP.
For starters, it’s terrible for J.D. Vance and anyone who
might challenge Vance for the nomination.
So long as the president hasn’t firmly ruled out running
again, Vance and the rest will need to defer to Trump’s wishes and not move
forward with their own candidacies—or even act like potential candidates, lest
they offend His Majesty with their presumptuousness. And given the president’s
narcissistic compulsion for attention, that deference period could last longer
than anyone expects. Republicans will want him to make a decision by 2027, but
the siren song of suspenseful will-he-won’t-he speculation could drag his
decision into 2028.
Imagine the Democratic field filling up after next year’s
midterms and their candidates spending a year introducing themselves to the
public while the GOP field remains frozen, languishing as Trump makes up his
mind.
Eventually he’ll make a decision, and that’ll be terrible
for Republicans too. If he drags his feet before opting not to run again, GOP
presidential candidates will have relatively little time and opportunity to
build their own independent political brands. And even if he opts out early-ish
in the process, Trump will inevitably resent the media spotlight placed on the
new nominee and will look for ways in his final year in office to reassert
himself as the party’s (and America’s, and the world’s) main character. Having
been denied the chance constitutionally to run again, he’ll police the nominee
from the Oval Office for any deviations from his vision for the country.
All of which is fine for Republicans, I guess, if you
think the rest of Trump’s presidency is likely to be a Reagan-esque success
that leaves America hungry for four more years. But given the trajectory we’re
on economically and civically, his successor being forced to run for what would
essentially be Trump’s third term in a Trump-weary nation, with Trump himself
repeatedly injecting himself into the campaign, isn’t the GOP’s ideal pitch.
And what if the president does decide to run? What if the
fact that he’s already selling “Trump 2028” merchandise turns out not to be a
“bit”?
The first thing that’ll do is awaken some Americans to
the truth of the “No Kings” complaint. Diehard tribalists like Ruffini and
Erickson will remain unreachable, but voters who came to the GOP late and
aren’t invested in the party may find themselves shocked by the president’s
autocratic pretensions the same way they’ve been shocked
by some of his other policies. Seeking an unlawful third term will make
Trump less popular, and less popular presidents have less political capital to
spend.
Forget the 22nd Amendment, though. “Trump
2028” would have a problem more basic than that—namely, the president’s age.
He’ll be 82 on Election Day 2028, older than Joe Biden was on Election Day
2024, and is already showing
signs of diminution. Asking Americans to ignore a black-and-white
constitutional rule about presidential term limits is one thing, asking them to
ignore it on behalf of a candidate who’ll be closer to 90 than to 80 if he were
to finish his third term is another.
The only thing Republicans worship more ardently than
Trump is power. There’s a case to be made that, given his age, the president
would be less likely to win the next election were he eligible and maintain the
GOP’s grip on power than 44-year-old J.D. Vance would be.
Then there’s the legal-political nightmare that a Trump
candidacy would foist on the party.
The GOP would be stuck backing a nominee who could and
almost certainly would be disqualified by the Supreme Court, throwing the race
into chaos. The court would obviously want to resolve the question of his
eligibility as soon as possible to minimize the uncertainty, but it’s unclear
to me if anyone would have standing to sue before the votes are in on Election
Day. The 22nd
Amendment says no one can be elected to the presidency more than twice,
remember, not that no one can be nominated if they’ve been elected twice.
Would Republican voters want to go forward with a
campaign led by someone who, even if victorious, would likely be barred from
taking office? What if the court chose to hear the case early and disqualified
Trump in, say, October 2028, giving Vance all of one month to introduce himself
to voters? Why would a sane political party want to risk that instead of moving
on from the president and holding a normal primary, especially after watching
how a last-second switcheroo worked out for Democrats in 2024?
I suspect most Republicans won’t want to risk it, but
they’ll have no choice. They’re hostages.
One last hostage.
Since 2015, right-wing politics has been a hostage
crisis. Populists who care nothing for the party or its pre-Trump principles
have taken the GOP captive and are forever threatening to shoot it by
withholding their votes unless Republicans support Donald Trump in whatever he
wants to do.
Populists don’t much care if Democrats win elections, but
they know that zombie partisans like Ruffini and Erickson do, so they can name
their price for their support. The price they demanded of conservatives after
January 6 was letting their hero off scot-free for the insurrection, which is
why Mitch McConnell and Senate Republicans contrived a lame procedural excuse
to acquit Trump at his second impeachment trial.
The price populists will demand of the GOP establishment
in 2028 is supporting Trump resolutely in his quest for a third term if he
chooses to pursue it.
Some impressive rationale will eventually be concocted to
explain why the 22nd Amendment shouldn’t apply, such as James Carville
said something mean. Trump loyalists will expect Republican officials
to amplify those claims, especially top-tier potential nominees like Vance and
Marco Rubio. And they will amplify those claims, because that’s how
hostage crises work: Vance, Rubio, and the rest of the GOP establishment will
calculate that humoring Trump is a safer play than opposing him and making
enemies of his MAGA base.
What’s the point of becoming the nominee over the
president’s objections, Vance will reason, if his voters will punish me in the
general election by staying home?
As the legal challenges to Trump’s candidacy play out,
populists will warn Republicans not to undermine the president’s cause by
offering themselves as just-in-case back-up candidates. The only way to
pressure the courts to rule in Trump’s favor, they’ll argue, is to show them
that the GOP won’t field a nominee if he’s disqualified. Judges won’t want to
risk delegitimizing an American election by having a Democrat run in November
2028 without major-party opposition. They’ll cave, supposedly, if the right sticks
with Trump and vows to accept no substitute.
The next step would be state Republican parties holding
primaries in which Trump is the only candidate on the ballot—even if he’s
already been disqualified by the courts. The people want four more years,
populists will cry. The judiciary is thwarting our democratic will,
never mind that the 22nd Amendment was ratified by two-thirds of
both houses of Congress and three-quarters of the states. And again,
establishment Republicans won’t resist lest they be accused by MAGA voters of
assisting the effort to disqualify Trump.
There’s a timeline in which we enter the general election
campaign with the president as the duly anointed Republican nominee yet legally
barred from serving another term. Populists would mount a write-in campaign on
his behalf, still believing that a forceful enough expression of popular
support might scare the courts into relenting. Meanwhile, Republican leaders,
state election officials, and judges would be forced to wrestle with what to
do. Should Vance, Trump’s running mate, be listed as the nominee on state
ballots? Should no one be listed? Should Trump be listed and all votes cast for
him be deemed void? Or should those votes be counted, with Vance becoming
president on January 20 instead of Trump in case Republicans win?
As Election Day approached, the GOP would be risking a
fiasco. Vance, having become the new nominee, might split Republican votes with
a Trump write-in campaign, dooming the party. Or maybe the president would
finally be cajoled into withdrawing, but only after his diehard fans grew so
embittered at the effort to block him that they resolved not to vote. Then,
when Democrats won, practically every right-winger in the country would turn
around and insist that the election had been “rigged” by the courts and therefore
the new president was illegitimate.
All because Donald Trump refused to comply with one of
the Constitution’s simplest and clearest commands.
We might end up with January 6 redux, except this time
the MAGA stooges in government and the craven Republicans in Congress would be
more willing to abet a White House plot to overturn an election on grounds of
“unfairness” than they were the first time around. Even at this late stage of
the process, the incentives on the right would continue to point toward
collaboration: Any GOP lawmaker who opposed the scheme to keep Trump in office
illegally would be marked for political, if not literal, death by populist
hostage-takers.
It wouldn’t surprise me if that’s the mysterious “plan”
to which Steve Bannon referred. The plan isn’t to concoct some ingenious legal
strategy that will convince the Supreme Court to read presidential term limits
out of the Constitution; perhaps the plan is simply to insist that the
president should serve another term and to not back down an iota as
institutional obstacles to that effort mount, until Trump feels enough
right-wing support for the idea has gathered that he can get away with staging
a proper coup to overcome his legal ineligibility.
The last Republican hostage crisis will end with a choice
for right-wing partisans: You can have an intact GOP, or you can have an intact
democracy. But you can’t have both.
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