Month: October 2025

Trump’s Third Term Scare

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

The Eaton Fire was nine months ago, but our rebuilding has only just begun. To support my work countering disinformation and conspiracy theories, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

Every so often, the three-shirt-wearing human blister known as Steve Bannon emerges from his podcast studio to interact with human beings who occasionally wash their hair.

In one recent occurrence, Bannon sat down for an interview with the editors of The Economist, a magazine not generally known for platforming incoherent rants by lunatics, yet laboring under the incorrect assumption that “liberalism demands dialogue with those who oppose it.”

It does not. And yet, in the middle of an otherwise anodyne chat about whatever bullshit is on his mind, Bannon uncorked this meatball of crazy:

“Well he’s gonna get a third term. Trump is gonna be president in ‘28 and people ought to just get accommodated with that. At the appropriate time we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan and President Trump will be the president in ‘28.”

Strictly speaking, unless Father Time decides to speed up the inevitable, Trump will be president in 2028, because his term doesn’t end until January 20, 2029.

But that’s not what Bannon meant. What Bannon meant was that Trump will circumvent the 22nd Amendment, run for an unconstitutional third term in office thanks to some nebulous “plan”, win that election, and be president until 2033, whereby his followers believe he’ll just do it again and again. So that’s great.

Trump, of course, has been talking about a third term on and off for years. He’s selling “Trump 2028” swag on his website, and was “not joking” when he claimed “a lot of people want him to” throw out the Constitution and make a grab for an eternal presidency.

He’s been doing that same “joking/not joking” dance since 2018, where he’s claimed that he might give a lifetime presidency a shot, and other times where he said he was going to run for four terms, deserved “extra years” because he was impeached, and even hinted at constitutional loopholes that would allow him to serve as a VP or Speaker for one day, then have everyone above him resign to be an unelected president. Hey, if Gerald Ford could do it…

On the flip side, he’s also said that he also has no intention of trying for a third term, and that he only sells 2028 merch and hints at another run to “drive the left crazy.” Which…works? Witness the absolute furor over Bannon’s remarks, which is the only reason why anyone outside the subscriber base of The Economist knew they’d spoken to Steve Bannon. The guy knows what makes the left insane and terrified, and damn if he isn’t going to provide it.

Now we’ve had days of the news cycle hijacked by this nonsense. The government is in shutdown mode, health insurance premiums are about to explode, and federal law enforcement is turning cities into war zones. But we’re talking about Steve Bannon and about Trump running for a third term, not anything that’s actually possible or legal.

Of course, when has Trump ever been stopped by something being impossible or illegal? Dude just does what he wants, when he wants, and how he wants – and knows his retinue of bootlickers and apologists will go along with it. He wants us afraid and believing he is unstoppable and inevitable, so why bother trying?

Tear down the East Wing? Incite a mob to sack the Capitol? Kill random fishermen and kidnap people off the streets for not being white? Deploy troops in the streets? Fuck you, try to stop me.

And so back we go to the prospect of a third term. It’s only illegal if laws mean something. It’s only impossible because nobody has tried it since the 22nd Amendment was passed. Trump might not always mean what he says, but he never says anything he doesn’t mean. Right?

It’s a losing game to try to deduce what Trump “really” is talking about at this point.  The whole “take him seriously/take him literally” thing has been a bust since 2016. But it’s been helpful to me to think of Trump running again as a type of invasion scare.

England in both the 19th and 20th centuries has been seized by stretches of terror that an invasion fleet was about to land on its shores. From Napoleon in the 1810s to Hitler in 1940, Britons were hunkering down, digging in, and preparing for the transports to appear on the horizon.

Both times, the threat was real, but it also wasn’t. Napoleon had no way to stop the Royal Navy from intercepting and destroying a potential invasion fleet, even though he had the men and transports to land in southern England, destroy the Channel ports, and possibly march on London.

Hitler didn’t even have that – he was hoping that repurposed river barges would be enough to land troops and tanks in England, and that the Royal Navy and Air Force would just politely allow it to happen.

In hindsight, the threats were massively overblown. But at the time, nobody knew that, or at least nobody could say it with 100% confidence. The fear was real, and it was enough to drive British policy, military deployment, economics, and psychology to the brink of mass panic. If either Napoleon or Hitler had even tried to invade England, it would have been a disaster and a total failure. But try telling that to someone in the path of a possible invasion. You don’t know until you know.

Like a cross-Channel invasion, an attempt by Trump to run for a third term would be a disaster for him. It’s probably not even physically possible. Trump is exhibiting clear signs of physical and cognitive decline, including taking two annual exams this year, admitting to having an MRI and swelling in his ankles, and exhibiting at least some signs of a stroke. It’s hard to get riled up by the possibility of Trump 2028 when Trump might not actually make it to 2028 in any kind of shape to govern.

Beyond that, the longer Trump and his enablers muse about various plans for 2028, the harder it makes things for actual 2028 candidates like Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. If Trump keeps hinting at a 2028 run, what is the rest of the GOP going to do? Sure, they’ll probably go along with it, but what if they don’t? There’s no reason for these people to shackle their political futures to an 82 year old man who thinks he’s the King of Israel and brags about acing a test where you identify an elephant. They have careers, too.

If Trump spends half of 2027 kicking around the idea of going for it, nobody else will be able to fundraise, hire staff, or lay the groundwork for an announcement. He would be kneecapping his own succession. Maybe that’s why he’d do it, because nobody else can do the job but him, even if he can’t do the job.

So what if he does go for it? What if he announces the day after the midterms that he’s running again? Fuck you, try to stop me.

Absolute chaos for the GOP, and the fundraising haul of the century for the Democrats would be among the first two things to happen. And there would probably a blizzard of lawsuits that keep Trump off the ballot in any state with a Democratic legislature or governor. Because the president doesn’t put himself on the ballot, states do. Elections are run by states. And many states are going to refuse to have anything to do with this nonsense. Because it’s unconstitutional and insane.

Imagine the GOP trying to hold a primary while Trump has announced a fourth run for office. How does that work? Trump declines more and more, while shoving anyone else out of the way, and destroying anyone who dares to try to mount a legitimate campaign. Meanwhile, various courts spend months kicking lawsuits around, and Trump is disqualified from appearing on ballots of states that he won in 2024, but that have Democratic governors – states the Republicans would need, like Michigan, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin.

Taking this ludicrous scenario to its conclusion, 2028 sees Trump running a fake and illegal primary campaign against real Republicans. The party is split in two with Trump “winning” states he can’t win, while a legitimate contender finds himself iced out of ballots on red states that would allow Trump to actually compete.

Could we have a Democrat win some states, Trump “win” others, and a different Republican win a few? How does any of this work? Why would anyone be okay with it, when Trump is declining so fast he might not even be coherent by then?

Sure, maybe the GOP just lets him do it, but even if it’s guaranteed to lead to a Newsom or Pritzker presidency? It seems unlikely. We have courts and laws, and while Trump can just do a lot of things by himself as president, running for a third term is not one of those things. It would take a massive buy-in by his entire party, and as his polling and health decline, the prospect of that buy-in declines just as quickly.

Ultimately, the third term can be effective as a scare tactic, but it’s not a real political strategy. Neither are even goofier scenarios, like Trump running as Vance’s VP and then Vance resigning on day 1, or exploiting slight differences in the wording of Constitutional amendments about presidential eligibility, or some magical amendment reversing the 22nd. Those things might be theoretically possible, but they aren’t practical or feasible.

The most likely scenario is that Trump ultimately tells himself and the country he could run for a third term and win if he wanted to, but he doesn’t want to. That lets him save face, play kingmaker for 2028, and still keep liberals scared and conservatives in line with the prospect of a sudden about face. He’s not a lame duck, he can convince himself, just a man who has Made America Great Again, and can go back to doing what he loves. Whatever that is.

Invasion scares fizzle out when the invader can’t run away from the reality of their situation anymore. Napoleon and Hitler both called off their invasions when it was clear they had no chance of success, and even trying to do so would be a complete disaster. Trump is almost certain to do the same, given the enormous opposition and low probability of actually accomplishing anything other than a humiliating defeat.

Trump 2028 might be a useful piece of trolling and a way to get attention and scare enemies, but that doesn’t mean the fear of it happening isn’t real.

It’s also not inevitable.

When the President Lies About You

Mike Rothschild1 Comment

The Eaton Fire was nine months ago, but our rebuilding has only just begun. To support my work countering disinformation and conspiracy theories, please consider a paid monthly subscription to my Patreon page. Thank you!

A lot has happened since we lost our home – to us, to our community, to our country. Rebuilding is a full time job, one that pays in exhaustion and crushing lows. And it doesn’t help anyone when the President of the United States lies to the entire country about what happened to you, and how he could have stopped it if only someone had let him.

Even with the relentless lying inherent to Donald Trump’s political rise, it’s still somewhat disconcerting to have the most powerful man in the world specifically making up an entire fiction about what happened to you and your community. And it’s even stranger that he does it in the service of making himself the real victim of the disaster, as opposed to the people whose lives were devastated and remain in perpetual limbo.

Over and over, in dozens of press conferences and public remarks, Trump has created a fantastical and fake version of the LA fires.

In this bizarre fantasy, the fires started because of Governor Gavin Newsom refused to allow water into California from Oregon in order to protect an endangered fish. They destroyed far more homes than they actually destroyed, and were only contained because Trump (who was not president) “broke into” the water supply of various Pacific Northwest states and funneled it through a “giant faucet” to put out the fires.

If you go by statements like these, he’s a hero, and also the real victim:

March 13: “A place called Los Angeles almost burned to the ground.  By the way, I broke into Los Angeles.  Can you believe it?  I had to break in. […] And we opened up the water, and the water is now flowing down.  They have so much water, they don’t know what to do.  They were sending it out to the Pacific for environmental reasons.  Okay?  Can you believe it?  And in the meantime, they lost 25,000 houses.  They lost — and nobody’s ever seen anything like it.”

May 6: “I always liked Gavin. I have a good relationship with him. I just got him a lot of water. I sent in people to open up that water. We just got him a lot of water. If they would’ve had that water and done what I said to do, they wouldn’t have had the fires in Los Angeles.”

June 10: “Look at the fires he had. He had fires where half the city it seemed burned down. What was it? 25,000 houses, all because he wouldn’t take water. I released the water from the Pacific Northwest and it came down, millions of gallons a day. And it’s right there, right now. They’d like to send it back.”

August 25: “They did lose 25,000 houses to a fire that should have never occurred. Because they didn’t let the water come down from the Pacific Northwest, which you guys don’t want to write about. I had to break into the water supply to let the water down. And even now we want more. We can have much more. Less than half of what should be coming in.”

September 3: “Newsom didn’t allow the water to come from the Pacific Northwest. I demanded that to be open. If that were open. You wouldn’t have had the fire because all the sprinklers would’ve worked in the houses.”

September 12: “They lost 25,000 houses to fires because they didn’t have the water come down from the Pacific Northwest. They have a lot of water but they send it out into Pacific to protect a little tiny fish which did very badly when it didn’t have any water, by the way.”

October 14: “They already lost 25,000 houses to fire because they wouldn’t let the water come in from the Pacific Northwest. They didn’t do it and we had 25,000 homes where they had no water in the sprinklers, they had no water in the fire hydrants. We broke in and had the water come down.”

If someone you loved were rambling this kind of relentless nonsense, touting himself as the victim of a disaster that only he could have stopped, you’d start looking at websites for memory care wards. But since it’s Trump, he has a cult of personality that holds up his every word as gospel, and a press that either just goes along to get along, or amplifies his lies. So he gets away with telling the same lie over and over again – he stopped the fire he didn’t stop, and could have stopped it sooner had Newsom, who did not start the fire, not stopped him from stopping it.

Obviously, this is very stupid. But it’s also incredibly dispiriting and depressing. It does nothing to help survivors, and instead kicks them while they’re down.

I lived through what he’s talking about, as did the tens of thousands of people in West Altadena who have been displaced by the fires. Naturally, he does not care. He hasn’t visited Altadena, he hasn’t mentioned it as far as I can tell, and has actively hindered our recovery process. In his first days in office, he repeatedly claimed that the fires happened because of an endangered smelt, and ordered the state to reroute water from the north to Southern California. There was no way to do this quickly or cheaply, and it wasn’t needed, because the fires had been almost entirely contained by the time he was inaugurated.

Since then, his administration has gutted the federal workforce, including the Forest Service and federal wildland firefighters. He has turned US relief agencies into shells of themselves, while threatening to all but close FEMA. And he has, again and again, threatened to withhold federal aid from the state if the government doesn’t meet a set of ridiculous conditions. We haven’t received billions in promised assistance for reasons Trump and his minions in the GOP won’t articulate.

Fire survivors in LA expected to do a lot of the heavy lifting of rebuilding without help from a Trump administration that has always spoken of Southern California as some kind of Satanic dumping ground. But the lying has become so pathological that one begins to wonder if he actually thinks it’s real – that he really believes he saved Los Angeles weeks before he became president, and we should thank him for it by arresting immigrants and giving him money.

He did not “break into” anything to release any water, nor did he have any ability to do anything of the sort before he was inaugurated again. A week after taking office, Trump ordered the opening of two dams in Central California, flooding unneeded and destructive water into Central Valley farmland owned by the farmers who have supported him election after election. It did nothing to help anyone, and was nowhere near LA. He called it a victory, when it was literally nothing but a cheap stunt and a knife in the back for his loyal farmer voters.

There is no “giant faucet” and Trump’s understanding of water on the west coast appears to be cribbed out of things he heard from donors and mixed with things he made up. It is an infantile flight of fancy to believe that a huge pipe can just be opened up to allow limitless “water from the Pacific Northwest,” because it doesn’t flow to LA, and the infrastructure to make that happen would be ludicrously expensive and inefficient. Nothing he’s talking about would have stopped the fires, and his relentless destruction of the federal government is all but ensuring that future fires will be worse, and that survivors will have fewer resources at their disposal to recover.

Trump is even lying about the number of homes lost in the fires, exaggerating it by almost half. About 13,000 homes were lost – a far cry from the 25,000 he keeps repeating.

Everything he has said about the fires is a lie, and it’s a lie that continues to turn the loss and devastation of thousands of families – people who live in the country that he is president of – into a cheap punchline. He doesn’t care about us, I get that. But he doesn’t even care to know what happened to us. He doesn’t care that he’s wrong. He doesn’t care that the fiction he’s created doesn’t help anyone and mocks our pain.

If you want to know what happened in Altadena and Palisades, ask someone who survived it. Talk to us, get our stories from the people who lived them. Trump’s ridiculous fiction is just that, a story he tells himself and his fans to make himself part of a story he wasn’t part of, and absolve him of giving a damn about the survivors. Because he doesn’t have to care.

We don’t have that option.