8th November 2024
The working assumption of many in reaction to the re-election of Trump as President is that he will serve a full term.
And that is the most likely outcome, as that is what presidents tend to do once elected: they serve out their term.
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But there are other possible outcomes.
Some outcomes are morbid, and they are possibilities for any president, especially for one advanced in years.
And there is the possibility he may step down mid-term – or be replaced mid-term.
If Trump stands down mid-term, the new President Vance could pardon him for all and any federal crimes (though not state crimes). This would meet one of Trump’s presumed objectives for having re-run for President.
And if the timing of the replacement is done just right then a President Vance has the prospect of up to (but not quite) ten years in office: here the Twenty-second amendment to the US constitution provides:
“Section 1. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. […]”
If the replacement is done on the day after the second anniversary of the start of the term, then there would seem nothing to prevent a President Vance from then running for election and then re-election as President.
[Edit – in other terms: (2 years minus one day) plus 4 years plus 4 years.]
It can also be noted that in a way Trump has done his job for his backers in getting re-elected and, accordingly, there is nothing more he can personally do for them which another friendly occupant of the Oval Office cannot also do. If their objective is dominance over the medium- to long-term then they will be already thinking about the approach to the 2028 election.
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And if there are doubts (real or otherwise) about the cognitive alertness of President Trump there is also the Twenty-fifth Amendment, where a President can be effectively removed against their will, on declaration of the (well) Vice-President and others.
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On the other hand, a President Trump serving a full term may suit his backers just fine.
Trump is not a President to personally drive legislation through Congress – he is not a Lyndon Johnson or a Franklin Roosevelt.
But with a Republican Senate he does not need to do so: they can drive through the legislation themselves, subject to the final composition of the House of Representatives.
What a lazy president enables is for those around him to dominate the judicial nominations and discretionary powers.
So we can expect a raft of conservative nominations for the judicial benches – and for Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito to stand down and be replaced by 40 or 50 year-old strong conservatives, nominated by Trump and approved by the Senate. That will secure the Supreme Court for the conservatives for at least another twenty years, if not more.
And we can expect a huge amount of Executive Orders and such like, which in turn will be upheld by conservative judges – for who needs congressional legislation when you can have the combination of executive rule-making and nod-along judges?
Those around Trump will not be the inexperienced incoming staffers of the 2017 presidency, but people who know what to do and how to do it, many with hard experience of the first Trump presidency.
They will know what to do so as to fit things around a golf-playing president.
Trump himself may not be busy, but those around him will be.
Brace, brace.
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Voters do get a say too. As we saw with the Conservative Party, voters can turn fairly severely in another direction.
I don’t think that will happen there. It’s much more tribal in the US. The other side is not so much opponent as enemy. Sources of truth have become inexplicable and single issue voters, some of whom appear quite sensible in other respects, have embraced what ought to have been unembraceable.
And Trump’s track record looks ever more impressive. Who would abandon him now that has been with him thus far?
Let’s face it, US politics is circling the drain. I don’t think there are any solutions that preserve the structure and it’s only a matter of time. Let’s learn from that and avoid similar mistakes in Britain if it’s not already too late. I think that once opponents become earnest enemies, it’s over.
Trump will not be satisfied with merely one more term, and it will be “interesting” to see how he and the party attempt to solve that.
A constitutional amendment is virtually impossible, but it may not be necessary. The SCOTUS have been creative recently and they alone interpret the Constitution. If the party backed him and believed it were possible, nothing prevents him being nominated again. The wording of the 22nd amendment seems quite clear, but can anyone really predict? Gravity has been defied again and again.
I am more worried about Trump finding ways to perpetuate himself in power, along the lines of Putin, and pliant courts going along with it.
Trump passes a constitutional amendment for foreign born US citizens to become president in order to pave the way for supporter Elon Musk to run in 2028, nicely setting up a Musk vs Schwarzenegger election.
He can’t. Any subversion will come by another means.
In all fairness, I have never really liked that eligibility requirement. Another constitutional amendment I would like to propose would be to remove the automatic right to citizenship upon birth in the country. It would go a long way towards curbing the sort of illegal immigration that is a legitimate concern.
But he led the ‘birther’ movement against Obama – that would be rank hypocrisy surely?
Is that likely to bother Trump?
Not really. That was purely about eligibility as a matter of constitutional law.
SH: [were Trump to remove the requirement that candidates for US President must be US-born]
“ But he led the ‘birther’ movement against Obama – that would be rank hypocrisy surely?”
Absolutely: it would be rank hypocrisy in any reasonable and balanced view.
But in modern politics (and not just in the USA) I think hyper-partisan supporters are indifferent to such things. If their “side” gains, it must be ok.
One of the most useful things I’ve read to help understand the hyper-partisan approach is George Orwell’ “Notes On Nationalism” from 1945. :
“ Indifference to Reality: All nationalists have the power of not seeing resemblances between similar sets of facts. A British Tory will defend self-determination in Europe and oppose it in India with no feeling of inconsistency. [India was still a British colony when Orwell wrote this. A more recent example might be an ardent English Brexiteer who was all for self-determination as a reason for leaving the EU, but then opposed Scottish Independence]. Actions are held to be good or bad, not on their own merits, but according to who does them, and there is almost no kind of outrage – torture, the use of hostages, forced labour, mass deportations, imprisonment without trial, forgery, assassination, the bombing of civilians – which does not change its moral colour when it is committed by ‘our’ side.
George Orwell, Notes on Nationalism (1945)
The essay is available on the Orwell Foundation website, and I really do recommend it.
https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/notes-on-nationalism/
What Orwell means by “nationalism” is not what we might immediately think of today, but is any system of thought by which someone:
*Pigeonholes others according to some characteristic(s) — not just nationality but ethnicity or faith or anything else;
*Assumes these are distinct groups which act “en bloc” politically to compete or struggle for prestige and power;
* (And most importantly) thinks that in this struggle one group —the one with which the nationalist identifies— is exempt from morals, ethics or shared rules.
As I say, it’s a superb and useful essay which explains a lot of recent political discourse.
As I already replied, I don’t agree with this rank hypocrisy take. It’s one thing to question whether an elected president falsified his birth record and lied about his eligibility, thereby questioning the legitimacy of the presdidency, and quite another to seek to change the eligibility requirements.
The birther movement was to doubt Obama’s eligibility from a constitutional law standpoint, whether it was stated that way or not. Change the constitution, change the law. No hypocrisy.
You express my own concerns. I’m pretty sure that JD Vance and his cronies have already made themselves expert in the terms of the 25th Amendment. They’ll keep a note of every Trump aberration and glitch until they’ve accumulated enough evidence of his incapacity for office. By that time Trump might be yearning for a life of cheating at golf every day, so might be more compliant than seems likely now and, no doubt, Melania would give her full support to the scheme.
No they won’t. Vance is a full-throated supporter. He will wait his turn. To even suggest that Trump may be or become unfit for office would undermine so much of the narrative that has helped them to win.
Harris was a good candidate (but possibly not a great one) but she only had a few months to do at least two years of work. Trump, and his enablers, have been working for four years.
A criticism of the Democratic Party (or Republicans or any group that votes for the executive) is they should be looking 2-3 elections ahead to know, train, support future candidates. Trump upended all of that. Those who were set to follow President Hillary Clinton are now doing other things.
Whomever runs for Senator in two years time, especially if they win, along with sitting state governors, will be the ones who may run with a shot of winning.
Unless Trump et al change the government as much as they threaten.
“Brace, Brace”, indeed!
It’s all plausible!
I remember Trump’s last term causing a mini-genre of “spill the beans” memoirs from Trump White House insiders who had resigned or had been fired.
And those memoirs did tend to describe a lazy, childish, narcissistic President with his “handlers”.
But then again, these were memoirs by former officials _who had resigned or been fired_ — possibly suggesting that their own attempt to be a Handler had gone wrong.
A successful Handler (or faction of handlers) would be still handling and keeping quiet about it, you’d have thought.
So Maybe Mr Trump is hard to Handle?
He also is said to play different factions of his entourage off against each other. It certainly looks like there are several different (and barely compatible) factions in his supporter base. Divide-and-rule might work well for Trump to stay atop the greasy pole for a while, if not to get anything useful done up there.
That would suggest a Presidency that does a random walk between the aims of different factions that come or go in influence. And not a disciplined quick march into authoritarianism.
But that’s barely encouraging if at all— years of White House infighting and drift are not going to help the USA or world with its problems either.
And by no means am I suggesting that this is more likely than the other storylines. It will all depend on who turns out to be the tiger and who the Lady from Riga. I have noticed that Ladies from Riga often have delusions of being the tigers, until too late.
Seems likely that whatever parts of the plan that require control of house and senate that they’ll try and drive through in the next 2 year given they can’t be sure how the midterms will go.
Ever perspicacious!!! Thank you
Thank you for your insight, David. The GOP won and Senate he House and Presidency. They totally own what happens next. Trump won the vote on promises about the cost of living issues and immigration. If he does not deliver, the GOP has no scapegoat, no excuse. Stark reality. Worryingly, the blue collar voters would feel utterly betrayed. An angry America is a frightening prospect, given the right to bear arms.
Indeed. By bringing home blue collar work and expelling immigrants from a tight labour market, he will increase inflation and make US political remain much too interesting.
Suspicions of electoral fraud are being voiced with increasing vigour, it seems to me. No incontrovertible evidence has been adduced, merely circumstantial, i.e., statistical: new registrations versus total votes cast. Techno-wizard Musk is the objectors’ prime suspect, and the thing about wizards is that you don’t need to know how they performed the trick in order to remain convinced that it was one.
If there’s one thing that I’m happy about with this election result, it’s that I know it will be accepted with a peaceful transfer of power. It was accepted early on by Harris and she conceded. It was acknowledged the next day by world leaders like our PM. Mutterings about election fraud are extremely unhelpful. Without confidence in the electoral system there is nothing holding it up. This needs to stop.