Is Donald Trump gearing up to spend four more years in office… or will he try for another eight?
The media insist the 45th president dropped hints he’s considering an extended stay in the Oval Office if he wins in November…and running for a third term.
“Are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?” Trump asked during a speech to the National Rifle Convention in Dallas earlier this month.
“Three!” yelled a supporter in the crowd.
Trump would be prohibited from serving a third time as president thanks to the 22nd Amendment, which set the limit at two terms.
Democrats and the Fake News media immediately began spinning that Trump would seek a third term as part of his plan to torch the Constitution.
“The fact that he’s even openly flirting with the idea of three terms shows how far his extremist, anti-democratic impulses can go,” screamed a left-wing “news” site called NowThis in a post to its 2.4 million followers on X (formerly Twitter).
Yes, it’s true that (if elected) Donald Trump would be constitutionally limited to his second term in office — but the fact that he’s even openly flirting with the idea of three terms shows how far his extremist, anti-democratic impulses can go. pic.twitter.com/UpnSxUT6er
— NowThis Impact (@nowthisimpact) May 22, 2024
It’s “dangerous,” said Rep. Maxine Waters, D-Calif. on MSNBC. Even if Trump meant it as a “cute” joke, “It’s not funny!” said Tim Miller of The Bulwark on MSNBC.
Conservative supporters say Trump wasn’t even talking about running for eight more years: He was implying that, since he actually won the 2020 election, the 2024 election would be his third victory—a claim Trump has made several times.
After all, he ruled it out just last month, In April, Trump told Time magazine, “I wouldn’t be in favor of it at all. I intend to serve four years and do a great job.”
One conservative group called the brouhaha over a third Trump term a “perfect example of media manufactured bullsh*t.”
Perfect example of media manufactured bullshit.
Trump is not talking about a third term.
He is asking 'if we win, will it be my 2nd or 3rd term.'
He is making reference to the dispute over 2020.pic.twitter.com/O6Bj9aIBJV
— Citizen Free Press (@CitizenFreePres) May 19, 2024
It’s also a perfect example of media hypocrisy. Just look back to the last two Democratic presidents.
“Eight more years! The case for removing term limits,” declared a 2012 story in The New Republic.
The calls got louder as the end of the Obama era came closer. “Democrats’ best choice for 2016 is the guy already in the White House,” wrote Matthew Yglesias in Vox. “Term limits clearly have to go. We should return to the democratic practice that served our country well for 150 years: Let the parties nominate whom they like, and let the voters choose their favorite.”
In July 2016, members of the Canadian Parliament cheered an address from Obama by chanting, “Four more years!” (For some reason, no one in the media considered that “foreign election interference.”)
Before Obama, and before the #MeToo movement, Democrats hoped Bill Clinton would run a third election.
Some urged him to team up with then-California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to repeal two constitutional amendments, so Clinton could run for a third term and Schwarzenegger could run for president even though he isn’t a natural-born citizen.
The Los Angeles Times let a law professor devise a theory that the parties could nominate Bill Clinton and Schwarzenegger as vice presidents, then become president—for a third term in Clinton’s case—if the candidate at the top of the ticket died or resigned.
But it’s not just the media: the presidents themselves used to talk about their desire for a third term.
“I actually think I’m a pretty good president. I think if I ran, I could win,” said Barack Obama during a speech in Ethiopia in 2015.
During the 2016 election, Obama doubled down on wanting to stay in power.
“I am confident in this vision” of “hope and change,” Obama told his longtime political strategist Davis Axelrod just after Hillary Clinton lost to Donald Trump, “because I’m confident that if I — if I had run again and articulated it, I think I could’ve mobilized a majority of the American people to rally behind it.”
Bill Clinton had the same thing to say after Al Gore lost the 2000 election.
If the Constitution hadn’t barred him, “I probably would have run again,” the 42nd president told Rolling Stone magazine..but then he went further.
Bill Clinton said the 22nd Amendment should be changed to say that a president can’t serve “two consecutive terms”—which would have let Clinton come back in 2004.
It’s not just Democrats. Ronald Reagan said—after he left office—that he would favor repealing the 22nd Amendment.
“It actually is a preemption of the people’s right to vote for whoever they want to vote for and as many times as they want to vote…and two terms isn’t necessarily enough to get done all you want to get done,” said Reagan Reagan during a 1989 speech.
Reagan would tragically announce he suffered from Alzheimer’s Disease in 1994.
But it seems the left-wing media are suffering from selective amnesia themselves.
What do you think: Should a president be able to run for a third term, or is eight years enough to have any one president in power?
Should the 22nd Amendment be repealed?
Vote here --