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UPDATE, 5:48 PM: Donald Trump seemed to joke around with gallows humor before about never leaving the White House now he’s back in power. Today, with some new math deployed, the current President of the United States started sounding like a President for life, for real.
Phoning in to Meet the Press earlier Sunday to tell host Kristen Welker that he wasn’t joking about busting the two-term Constitutional limit, Trump declared there are “methods” to the 45th and 47th POTUS staying in office past January 20, 2029. Later, as his remarks were picked up all over the world as he knew they would be, Trump both doubled down and skated around the topic this evening on Air Force One.
“I’m not looking at that but I’ll tell you, I have had more people ask me to have a third term, which in a way is a fourth term because the other election, the 2020 election was totally rigged, so it’s actually sort of a fourth term,” Trump told reporters when asked on the plane late Sunday on his way back to DC from another weekend golfing in Florida if he was intending to leave office at the end of this term or not. “I just don’t want the credit for the second because Biden was so bad, he did such a bad job, and I think that’s one of the reasons that I’m popular, if you want to know the truth,” he added, with more his greatest hits of grievance against his predecessor and how he is right about everything, according to the White House Pool report.
Never denying his intention to stay in power, but insisting again and again he didn’t want to talk about it, Trump kept talking about it Sunday.
“I don’t even want to talk about a third term now because no matter how you look at it, you’ve got a long time to go,” the 78-year-old POTUS said, noting to the media that he had been speaking with some “very important people today” about the success he believes his latest administration has had since coming into office on January 20. “We have a long time. We have almost four years to go and that’s a long time but despite that so many people are saying you’ve got to run again. They love the job we’re doing. Most importantly they love the job we’re doing.”
As a part of that, Trump has been calling April 2 “Liberation Day” in reference to the wide-spread tariffs he is imposing on Canada, Mexico, the EU, UK, China, and basically everyone else around the Globe.
PREVIOUSLY, 3:10 PM: Fighting court orders left, right and center plus economically battling longtime allies all over the globe, Donald Trump believes he can get a third term as President and that he has the poll numbers to back that currently unconstitutional ambition.
“No, I’m not joking,” Trump chillingly and bluntly told NBC News’ Kristen Welker Sunday of his desire to stay in office past January 20, 2029. “I’m not joking.”
“Well, let me put it this way, you have to start by saying, I have the highest poll numbers of any Republican for the last 100 years,” Trump told NBC News’ Kristen Welker Sunday of the impetuous for a third term. “We’re in the high 70s in many polls, in the real polls, and you see that, and, and you know, we’re very popular,” the Republican added on the phone from another weekend in Florida. “And you know, a lot of people would like me to do that. But, I mean, I basically tell them, we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.”
Trump, unlike his rivals and other politicians, often says exactly what he will do before he really does it. In that context, the 45th and 47th POTUS was on a roll today.
Expressing a rare stint of being “pissed off” at Russia’s Vladimir Putin over no ceasefire in Ukraine, Trump then told Welker more about his third term designs: “There are plans. There are – not plans. There are, there are methods which you could do it, as you know.” Responding with specifics from the 22nd Amendment, the Meet the Press host sidestepped the obvious authoritarian nature of what Trump was saying and got into the Constitutional weeds.
As the transcript shows:
KRISTEN WELKER: Well, let me throw out one where President Vance would run for office and then would, basically, if, if you – if he won, at the top of the ticket, would then pass the baton to you.
DONALD TRUMP: Well, that’s one. But there are others too. There are others.
KRISTEN WELKER: There are others? Can you tell me another?
DONALD TRUMP: No.
Tossing the very ambitious and audience of one focused Vance under the succession bus again, Trump went on to say he “may” let his VP take over when this second term is up. “It’s too early to think about it.”
Since returning to office on January 20, and during last year’s election, Trump has riffed again and again on seeking a third term. However, today’s interview with the Comcast-owned network is the most serious he has seemed on the very brittle matter. The other issue for others is that besides Trump becoming VP himself in 2029 and then Vance or another POTUS resigning to let him take back the Oval Office for a maximum of another two years, the Constitution has no plausible remedies for someone who wants to serve more than two full terms as president and two years of another president’s term as their successor.
The only way to legally alter a Constitutional amendment is with a two-thirds approval vote in Congress, followed by ratification by 38, or three-fourths, of the states. Being that ain’t happening in any way anytime soon, there are national emergency measures that in theory could suspend election and the constitution. Yet, ballots were cast even during the Civil War and WWII so the MAGA crowd would have to pull a pretty big rabbit, like the Insurrection Act, out of the hat to break precedent and award Trump a third term.
Almost always speaking the quiet thing out loud, Trump today went on to say to Welker, “I hope you’re going to mention, I have the highest ratings of any Republican in 100 years.”
The assumption is the 78-year-old Trump was referring to approval ratings, the most common way politicians are gauged beyond the ballot box, and not TV ratings (though you never know with Trump).
With that, the NBC News host did not challenge the former Celebrity Apprentice host’s popularity claim and instead returned to the third term topic. However, and we all know now how obsessed Trump is with being the best and biggest ever, POTUS’ claims are simply false – by a lot.
Shattering norms, locking up Green Card holders, tariffing everyone and running roughshod over Congressional oversight, Trump’s efforts could come to a halt if the GOP’s sliver thin three-vote lead in the House of Representatives is lost in next year’s midterms or even before Up against some special elections in Florida and Wisconsin on April 1, a massive backlash and a potential economic down turn Trump is starting to feel the political heat as scandals and the threat of a recession loom.
Still, the pitchman man for his own shortcoming, political and otherwise, Trump’s statement about his sky-high ratings (once a Reality TV host always a Reality TV host) forgets the facts of even recent history.
Trump’s approval ratings (which we assume he was talking about when he said “ratings” to NBC News’ Welker this morning are at 45% according to a recent poll from Reuters/Ipso. A CBS poll this week had Trump at 50% approval and 50% disapproval – a telling sign for a divided America.
At this point in his second term, Trump is up a notch from where he was back in 2017. Sunday the White House said in a statement that “Americans overwhelmingly approve and support President Trump and his America First policies.”
Yet, compared to Joe Biden (57%) and Barack Obama (69%) from this point in their first terms, Trump is down. Far from having the highest ratings of any Republican in 100 years.” Trump doesn’t even have the best approval rating among GOP POTUS’ for the last 50 years
The stratospheric top spot goes to the 90% approval rating George W. Bush had right after the 9/11 attack. POTUS 43 was just ahead of George H.W. Bush, his father and POTUS 41. The elder Bush had an 89% approval rating in the days after the completion of Operation Desert Storm in early 1991, according to Gallup. Ronald Reagan’s popularity hit 68% twice. It was once for the Great Communicator in May 1981, just after he was shot, and in May 1986 in the wake of the treacherous accident at the USSR’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant in what is now Ukraine.
In typical Democrats fashion, the opposition was relatively mum on Trump’s alarming comments today. The exception being newly voted in DNC boss Ken Martin:
Democrats, it should be added, are a record low of around 29% approval rating with the American public.
