Trump has ordered the U.S. Treasury to draft a $1 coin featuring him on both sides, for the purpose of “honoring America’s 250th Birthday and @POTUS,” according to Treasury officials.

Meanwhile, Trump wants the Washington Commanders to name their planned $3.7 billion stadium after him. A senior White House source told ESPN: “It’s what the president wants, and it will probably happen.” Presumably, Trump’s name will be carved into a granite facade at the stadium’s entrance.

The giant $300 million ballroom that Trump is adding to the White House is called “the President Donald J. Trump Ballroom” on the list of donors to the project, and senior administration officials say the name is likely to stick.

Trump is moving to immortalize himself with his name etched into coins, carved into pediments, and inscribed into White House marble. He wants to glorify himself in the most permanent ways possible.

This is what fascist dictators do when in power. Stalin, Hitler, and Mussolini built monuments to glorify themselves so they’d be exalted in history.

Democracies don’t do this. They memorialize their heroes only after they’ve died, and only if the public wants them commemorated.

Trump deserves to be remembered — but not as a hero. To the contrary: It is our solemn duty to ensure he is remembered for all that he has done and may still do to destroy American democracy.

He must be remembered as the president who claimed without evidence that an election was “stolen” from him. Who then instigated a coup that included false electors, threats to state officials, and an assault on the U.S. Capitol that resulted in five deaths and injuries to 174 police officers.

He should be remembered as the president who, after being reelected, tried to erase the nation’s memory of what he had done by pardoning 1,600 rioters who had been criminally convicted for participating in the Capitol attack and 77 people who had conspired with him to carry out the attempted coup. He called them all “patriots.”

He must be remembered as the president who then usurped the powers of Congress. Who denied people due process of law. Who prosecuted his political opponents. Who violated international law by killing people he labeled enemy combatants. Who sent the military into American cities over the objections of their mayors and governors. And who openly and brazenly took bribes.

We must not allow Trump to erase this history with false tributes to himself, etched into silver, marble, or granite.

Instead, after he is gone, a monument should be erected to remind future generations of Trump’s treachery and the treachery of officials who supported him.

It would be a simple building constructed of iron and cement, containing the records of his attacks on democracy and the names of everyone who aided him.

Over its doorway would be the words “Trump’s Treason.”

It would be situated on the White House lawn where the Trump ballroom (since demolished) once stood. It would face Pennsylvania Avenue so that families visiting the nation’s capital — including those commemorating America’s 500th anniversary — have easy access, and will long remember this catastrophe.

Robert Reich is a professor of public policy at Berkeley and former secretary of labor. His writings can be found at https://robertreich.substack.com/

On Newsweek’s new video podcast "The 1600," constitutional scholar and lifelong conservative Justin Stapley warns that the MAGA movement’s problems run far deeper than any single election cycle.

Stapley, host of The Conservative Underground podcast, argues that the "GOP’s outward strength under President Donald Trump masks a party increasingly defined by internal division, ideological drift, and the growing influence of populism and online-driven extremism," Newsweek says.

"Speaking with Newsweek's Carlo Versano, Stapley warns that Trump’s personal dominance has masked the extent to which traditional conservatism has been sidelined, leaving Republicans unprepared for what comes after Trump," they write.

In response to Versano saying "Republicans got smoked" in the November elections, Stapley, who is also the state director of the Utah Reagan Caucus, says the problem runs deeper than just one election cycle.

"What we’ve discovered is that the last 10 years haven’t been a direct ideological shift so much as a propaganda coup," he says.

"People will walk up with a swagger, red MAGA hat, angry look, and say, 'Oh, we've got a zombie Reaganite over here.' And then everyone else will stop and say, 'Wait, I thought we liked Reagan.' There’s confusion among ordinary Republicans," he adds.

Those "ordinary Republicans," he explains, are not part of the MAGA movement and are still steeped in Reaganism.

"Ordinary Republicans still embrace Reaganism and traditional conservatism because they understand the country is built on deep philosophical roots," he says. If people want to abandon all that because it's 'holding us back,' that’s not what many Republicans signed up for."

Stapley is no Trump fan, saying, that while we've had some bad presidents before, "he’s worse because we’ve gutted the checks and balances that used to exist."

"Congress has become almost an empty branch of government — even though it was meant to be the 'first among equals.' The modern presidency has grown and grown. Congress has become the president’s foot soldiers," he says.

Stapley also explains that there is a crack in the MAGA base because Trump "can't please everyone," and he sees MAGA morphing into something entirely different that what it is currently.

"We may soon see 'America First' meaning something very different from MAGA," he says.

"Trump still holds the MAGA brand, but you have people like Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nick Fuentes, Tucker Carlson, Matt Walsh saying 'I’m America First, and I’m America Only.'"

Without Trump on the ballot in 2028, Stapley says Republicans have work to do.

"Republicans need to figure out their identity. People say they’ve remade themselves into a blue-collar populist party with a bigger coalition. But that coalition doesn’t show up without Trump," he says.

They also need to realize the truth about Trump.

"Even with Trump, we’ve overestimated his strength. He’s run in three consecutive presidential elections and never broken 50 percent," he says. "He has a 47 percent ceiling unless he’s running against a candidate who’s mentally not there or one who didn’t go through a Democratic selection process."

Donald Trump uses a well-worn technique of saying several distinctly different things in one exchange, or in a series of exchanges, allowing people—including media, but also voters—to choose what they want to hear.

A case in point in the past few days is his answer regarding running for a third term, something that the 22nd amendment explicitly prohibits for any president elected to two previous terms.

A reporter asked Trump about Steve Bannon’s recent interview with The Economist, in which Bannon referred to a “plan” that would get around the 22nd amendment to make Trump president. “Trump is going to be president in 2028. And people just ought to get accommodated with that,” Bannon claimed.

Trump answered the question by saying this: “I haven’t really thought about it… but I have the best poll numbers I’ve ever had.” (That was a joke, as Trump’s numbers are in the toilet—but he doesn’t pass up any opportunity to spread disinformation.) And then he said, we “have great people,” floating Marco Rubio and JD Vance as strong candidates for president, suggesting he would not be running for president.

But then Trump added, “I would love to do it,” followed by this ambiguous line: “Am I not ruling it out? I mean, you’ll have to tell me.”

When asked about a scheme racing around right-wing circles in which he would run for vice president in 2028—which is legally dubious, but less clear cut—and then become president after his running mate resigns once in the Oval Office, Trump appeared to throw cold water on it while also saying he’s “allowed” to do it:

Yeah, I’d be allowed to do that…You’d be allowed to do that, but I wouldn’t do that. I think it’s too cute. Yeah, I would rule that out, because it’s too cute. I think the people wouldn’t like that. It’s too cute. It’s not—it wouldn’t be right.

So, in this entire exchange, Trump both promoted the idea of running and refused to rule it out—which tracks with statements and actions this year, including trolling online with Trump 2028 hats—and suggested he wouldn’t run by promoting other candidates for president while dismissing what appears to be the only semi-debatable way he could legally become president again.

People can take from it what they want. Most of the media reported on both responses—Trump dismissing running for VP as “too” cute but not ruling out a third term—but there was little in-depth coverage of how Trump would seek a third term. I believe that’s because it would mean speculating that he’s lying about not using the VP loophole or that he will engage in a coup. And our corporate media is deathly afraid of going to either place.

It’s possible Trump is promoting the idea of a third term, as some suggest, merely to elevate his power and put fear into people while he doesn’t have actual intentions of seeking it. A lame duck president is seen as weak, and Trump may be trying to scare Republicans in Congress, so they don’t begin pushing against him.

At the same time, we cannot rule anything out with Trump. And media should be deeply delving into anything he says, laying out the scenarios.

There’s nothing in the major news outlets, however, about the possibility of Trump staging a coup—even though he attempted to do so in 2020 and sent his MAGA mob to attack the Capitol. Conservative former appeals court judge J. Michael Luttig, writing in the Atlantic, explained this week just how much easier it would be for Trump to be successful the next time:

Today, Trump has vastly greater powers than he did in 2020. He has a willing vice president to preside over the joint session of Congress that will certify (or not) the next election, a second in command who refuses to admit that his boss lost the 2020 election. (Vance has said that he would not have certified the results without asking states such as Pennsylvania and Georgia to submit new slates of electors, a solution he invented to a problem that does not exist—there is no evidence of widespread fraud in those states or any state in 2020.)
Trump’s party controls both houses of Congress, and he will surely do everything he can to maintain those majorities. The Supreme Court, meanwhile, has paved the way for a third Trump term, as it did for his current term, by essentially granting him absolute immunity from criminal prosecution for any crimes he might commit in violation of the Constitution or the laws of the United States.

This kind of discussion is exactly what corporate media should be raising. They may claim it’s too conspiratorial and speculative, but the truth is that they’re just plain afraid. After all, it’s nothing out of the realm of possibility for Trump, because he’s attempted it all before.

They fall back on Trump giving mixed messages, and much of the public that wants to deny what Trump says follows suit. But how many times in the past nine months have we heard from Trump supporters, from Joe Rogan and the bro podcasters to average Trump voters, who’ve soured on Trump and now say they only thought he’d be going after hardened criminals—”the worst of the worst”—in his mass deportations?

How many times have we seen them express astonishment at the tariffs to which they are now strongly opposed? How many times have we watched as they expressed shock about mass firings in the government or attacks on foreign leaders and lands?

Trump said he was going to do all of this. He explicitly discussed deporting tens of millions of people during the 2024 campaign, for example, and even raised the reality of deporting mothers whose children are American citizens.

But people pre-disposed to like Trump’s rage and who were easily conned by his economic promises only heard what they wanted to hear. And much of the media has enabled this by not digging deeply into what Trump says, particularly when he purposely puts out mixed messages like a smorgasbord for people to choose from.

Right-wing UFC star Bryce Mitchell, an evangelical Christian who said during the campaign that he’d “take a bullet” for Trump, is now calling Trump the “Antichrist.” The fighter wrote on Instagram this week:

I do not like the guy at all…
Putting America last, and now he’s blaming the beef farmers for the price of beef. Hey, I’m not biased, man. He talked a good game, he tricked me. It fooled me. I admit it.

I’m glad he admits he was tricked and fooled. But again, it’s not like Trump didn’t say what he was going to do during the campaign. People who choose what they want to hear need to be hit over the head again and again with facts and analyses of potential outcomes. And unfortunately, our media didn’t do that and still isn’t doing it.

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In 1944, President Franklin Delano Roosevelt did something that no U.S. president has done since: He won a fourth term. But all of the presidents who followed FDR served only one or two terms, as the U.S. Constitution's 22nd Amendment — which was fully ratified in 1951 — mandates term limits for presidents, and two terms is the maximum allowed.

But far-right MAGA Republican Steve Bannon, host of the "War Room" podcast and former White House chief strategist in the first Trump administration, is claiming that there is a way around the 22nd Amendment and that Trump is, in fact, eligible for a third term. And Trump, in interviews, brags that he deserves to stay in the White House after the 2028 election.

In an article published on October 28, however, New York Magazine's Ed Kilgore argues that talk of a third Trump presidency could backfire on the Republican Party and the MAGA movement.

"MAGA chatter about an unconstitutional third term for Donald Trump is back — because it never goes away," Kilgore observes. "He could make it disappear with a few definitive sentences. Occasionally, he breaks character and shows he knows it ain't happening, but there's always an asterisk…. . In any event, he clearly wants to keep alive the speculation that, just as he managed an extremely improbable comeback in 2024, he might find a way to stick around beyond 2028, despite the fact that he will be older than Joe Biden was in 2024 and despite, you know, the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution."

One of the MAGA Republicans who is hurt the most by talk of a third Trump term, according to Kilgore, is Vice President JD Vance — who is often mentioned as possible 2028 presidential candidate.

"Before long, there could be a Trump third term bubble large enough to blot out the sky," Kilgore explains. "When it inevitably bursts — as it will unless Trump seriously considers a military coup and an actual, undisguised fascist dictatorship — MAGA folk will be very disappointed and may be less than enthused about being offered the booby prize of JD Vance. The Ohioan might be fine as a momentary placeholder, but as the leader of the Free World and inheritor of the MAGA movement? Vance might be the worst of both worlds for the GOP: someone who doesn't excite the party's feral base but does terrify Democrats as an authentic authoritarian more interested in crushing the opposition forever than in sorting through bribes and turning the White House into a gaudy and gilded monument to himself."

Kilgore adds, "If Trump does want to sell Vance to his party and to the general electorate, he will need to get out of the way. That could be one problem Trump really can't 'fix.'"

Read Ed Kilgore's full article for New York Magazine at this link (subscription required).

“For anyone holding their breath,” someone said online a couple weeks ago, “waiting for this fascist Trump regime to hit rock bottom: There is no rock bottom. Their depravity will continue to shock the world, week after week, for as long as they hold power.”

It is a good time to reflect on how true this statement is as we approach the one-year anniversary of Donald “Poisoning Our Blood” Trump’s second presidential election.

Mad “king” Trump is now blowing up random boats, slaughtering innocents in the Caribbean and Eastern Pacific, claiming without a hint of a wisp of a scent of evidence that the people he is massacring in cold violation of international and national law and basic decency are “enemy combatant” narco traffickers “at war with the United States.”

Trump is gathering major military forces off the coast of Venezuela in preparation for a likely regime-change war on that nation. He may also attack Colombia, whose president has angered him by criticizing his extrajudicial executions in international waters.

Trump and the key people around him... are dedicated sociopathic fascists eager to stamp out the last embers of American democracy, decency, deliberation, and rule of law by any and all means “necessary.”

He is sending $20 billion to Argentina to back his fellow far-right president there as 42 million US Americans face hunger because he is cutting off their Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) benefits.

Former SNAP recipients will join masses of federal workers Trump has thrown out of work on food lines as Trump demands $230 million from his Department of Justice as “compensation” for its (badly belated) indictment (under former President Joe Biden) of Trump for… you know, trying to overthrow electoral democracy and the rule of law at the end of his first horrific administration (and for absconding with classified documents and obstructing efforts to retrieve them).

Trump has just maniacally torn down the East Wing of the White House, planning to replace that former historic landmark with a gargantuan, gaudy ballroom funded by some of his favorite capitulating corporations, including the tech giants Google, Meta, and Palantir and the leading “defense” firm Lockheed Martin.

The Congress has been essentially dissolved by Trump through his command over the Speaker of the US House, the obsequious Mike Johnson (R-La.). This makes legislative branch oversight of Trump’s war moves and plans impossible. It also prevents the release of the Epstein Files, which contain information on his close relationship with a disgraced pedophile, and congressional action to restore SNAP benefits (food stamps). (Johnson is meanwhile refusing to seat a duly elected congresswoman from Arizona since, according to media reports, she would tilt the US House majority to the side of the files’ release.)

Trump has slapped 50% tariffs on Brazil to punish it for properly prosecuting and convicting his fascist comrade Jair Bolsonaro (the onetime “Trump of the Tropics”) for sparking an attempted insurrectionist coup (Brazil’s January 6) in that nation’s capital on January 8, 2023.

Among the many ways in which Trump is mimicking his role model Adolph Hitler is his attempt to rule through executive order and memorandum.

A recent Trump memo–NPSM-7–absurdly attributes recent domestic US political violence to a supposedly top-down movement of left-wing terrorism and tells federal law enforcement to investigate and potentially prosecute any group or individual who advances “anti-fascist” ideas, including even criticism of “Christianity” and “traditional” family and gender relations.

Trump has unleashed his Department of Justice on a transparently political campaign of prosecutorial retribution against his enemies and critics. He has even directed his fascist attorney general to investigate people Joe Biden pardoned.

The deranged, orange-sprayed POTUS responded to the remarkable outpouring of 7 million Americans in the No Kings Day protests held in more than 2,500 cities and towns two weeks ago by posting an AI video showing “King Trump” wearing a crown while piloting an Air Force bomber that dumped liquid shit on protesters in New York, Chicago, and other US cities.

There’s far more than online fantasy in the menace Trump poses to the US cities. Herr Donald’s 21st-century Gestapo, Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), and its junior partner Border Patrol, are many months into a reign of racist, xenophobic-nationalist, and militarized police state terror across urban America. Among its many outrages, this assault has included the disgraceful deployment of Black Hawk attack helicopters and hundreds of heavily armed storm troopers against the residents of a large apartment complex in the Black Chicago neighborhood of South Shore. Small children of color were thrown on the street, zip-tied, and tossed into vans.

The Trump regime is recruiting ICE agents from the ranks of the Proud Boys and other paramilitary fascist groups. It is building mass detention camps from coast to coast with taxpayer funding that makes ICE more well-funded than the militaries of every nation except the US and China.

But what did we expect? Is any of this surprising? Trump45 led an insurrectionist coup attempt on January 6. 2021. He campaigned on political “retribution” and a promise of racist mass deportations animated by his Hitlerian claim that brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning our blood.”

Trump’s sadistic puppy-killing Homeland Security head Kristi Noem, aptly nicknamed “Gestapo Barbie,” coldly rejected Illinois Governor JB Pritzker’s request that she suspend the terror in Chicago for Halloween weekend so that Chicago-area children could go out trick-or-treating without fear of being tear-gassed and zip-tied by Trump’s gendarmes.

Mein Trumpf47 has invaded Los Angeles, Washington DC, and Memphis with the National Guard. He sent the US Marines into Los Angeles. He is pressing to militarily invade Portland, Oregon on the basis of the utterly absurd claim that “radical left terrorists” are “burning” that city “to the ground.” In a nod to the Slaveowners’ Confederacy, whose virulent racist legacy he and his openly Christian white nationalist (neofascist) “Secretary of War” Pete Hegseth uphold, Trump has asked his Supreme Court to summarily reverse lower court rulings that have so far blocked his bid to put Texas National Guard troops in Chicago.

Trump has said that Illinois Gov. Pritzker and Chicago Mayor Brandon Johnson “should be in jail” since they have not ordered state and city police to join ICE and Border Patrol’s racist kidnapping operations.

Three weeks ago, the depraved fascist-in-chief Trump and Hegseth ordered 800-plus generals and admirals to Quantico, Virginia from across the vast American global empire to hear them say that America’s real adversary is “the enemy within,” meaning the residents of the nation’s majority nonwhite and “radical left” cities. Trump told the stone-faced brass that American cities need to become “training grounds” for the US military.

In his emergency request for a Supreme Court shadow docket ruling that will green-light the military takeover of Chicago and other cities, Trump has dispensed with his past invocations of federal statutes that supposedly permit him to bypass the Posse Comitatus Act and the 10th Amendment to the Constitution and argued instead that the judicial branch has no constitutional right to opine on his power to deploy the military anywhere he wants for whatever reason.

If he doesn’t get what he wants from the Christian fascist court he molded during his first term he will likely invoke the ancient slaveowners’ Insurrection Act to put troops in Democratic Party-run majority nonwhite cities.

The Trump regime is moving in numerous ways to rig the 2026 midterms, which may well take place in the intimidating, vote-suppressing presence of occupying troops in US cities.

Even without National Guard or regular duty troops deployed, the direct federal gendarmes of ICE and its junior partner Border Patrol–unencumbered by the 10th Amendment and Posse Comitatus law and filled in its ranks with the most racist and reactionary thugs in the federal state–have already this year undertaken a federal military attack on US cities, replete with advanced weaponry and Black Hawk attack helicopters. The nation’s cities, and most especially those cities’ Latino sections, are already under de facto military occupation.

But what did we expect? Is any of this surprising? Trump45 led an insurrectionist coup attempt on January 6. 2021. He campaigned on political “retribution” and a promise of racist mass deportations animated by his Hitlerian claim that brown-skinned immigrants are “poisoning our blood.” On his first day in office, he pardoned more than 1,500 January 6 putschists and criminals, commuted the long prison sentences handed down to the nation’s top two paramilitary fascist leaders for their roles in the Capitol Riot, and signed an executive order purporting to end the explicit constitutional right of birthright citizenship.

On July 1, 2024, Trump’s Christian fascist Supreme Court granted him forever immunity from prosecution for any crime he committed past or future under the rubric of “official presidential duties.”

Trump and the key people around him, including above all Stephen “We Are the Storm!” Miller, are dedicated sociopathic fascists eager to stamp out the last embers of American democracy, decency, deliberation, and rule of law by any and all means “necessary.” The Trump regime and the Trump party’s wild denunciation of the second No Kings Day protests as “radical left,” “Marxist” (I’m one), and “terrorist” rallies dedicated to “hating America” is symptomatic of their fascist ideology, which requires socialist, Marxist, and communist enemies even when such enemies do not exist to any significant degree, as in the US today (unlike in Germany in the early 1930s).

The Trump regime’s obsessive hatred of “the left” more than merely echoes Hitler and Goebbels’ fanatical calls and pledges to “restore German greatness” by saving it in from dreaded Marxists and “Judeo Bolsheviks” who had supposedly “stabbed the nation in the back” during and after World War I.

The former Fatherland News co-host and current “Secretary of War” Pete “I’ll Stop Drinking if You put Me Atop the Pentagon” Hegseth (member of a far-right church whose pastor says that the best period in American race relations was the era of Black chattel slavery) is a “Christian” white nationalist zealot who salivates over the prospect of unleashing the US military on US cities. He holds his position despite his monumental incompetence in great part because Trump47 is counting on him to do what Trump45’s military chiefs wouldn’t do: Use bloody force against US citizens and residents on US soil. A recently leaked Signal chat shows that Hegseth has been thinking about sending the elite US Army 82nd Airborne to crush anti-ICE protests in Portland.

In a sign of how insane and depraved things have gotten atop the US government (and how lame and Weimar-like some top Dems are), I recently put up this Onion-style spoof online:

Unnamed sources report that Donald Trump has ordered the Secretary of War Pete Hegseth to present a plan next week for the nuclear annihilation of every US city with a population of 500,000 or more. Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer (D-N.Y.) says that “any such plans would be contrary to the national interest and inconsistent with the Democrats signing on to a budget agreement to end the government shutdown.” Asked for comment, former President Barack Obama said that “the nuking of our major cities by our own military would be a major setback for our great nation.” Obama cautioned that “Democrats should seek bipartisan support for a congressional resolution questioning the legality of a US nuclear attack on major US cities. I know it can sometimes be difficult to win votes on the other side of the aisle,” Obama added, “but the genius of America is that at the end of the day we’re all on the same team. It would be terrible to lose Chicago or St. Louis, of course, but we’re still all Americans at the end of life on Earth.”

Crazy, right? And yet serious, intelligent people understandably felt the need to make sure it wasn’t for real. As one of my brilliant readers commented: “My first thought was to laugh, my second thought was ‘Let me Google this and make sure it’s a joke.’ I was relieved to discover it was not a real story but disturbed that I felt the need to check because it sounded like something he might consider.”

That’s because there really are no limits to the depravity of this fascist regime. There is no rock bottom.

After understanding this, the next and obvious question is what to do about it?

A strange thing happened over the past few days. No sooner did Donald Trump again float the idea of running for a third term, saying,” I’d love it” and “I’m allowed to do it,” than he backtracked completely, saying, “I guess I’m not allowed to it” and it’s “too bad.”

In between, House Speaker Mike Johnson rushed to tell the press, “I don’t see the path” for a Trump third term, and said he’d spoken with Trump about it on the same day—basically talking Trump down from his first statement in less than 24 hours, or so it appeared.

Now, don’t get me wrong. None of us should trust anything Trump says. He is a dictator and clearly wants to stay president, and he has already engaged in an attempted coup. So his word means nothing. But the backtrack was nonetheless odd.

What actually happened? A few things. It seems, first off, that Steve Bannon, in his interview with The Economist on Friday, may have been trying to mess with JD Vance—whom he can’t stand and has worked to take down—who’s made it quite clear he’s the heir to MAGA and wants to be president in 2028.

As I wrote on Tuesday, Bannon told The Economist editor that there was a “plan” to get around the 22nd amendment, which bars a president from running more than twice. “Trump is going to be president in 2028. And people just ought to get accommodated with that,” Bannon claimed.

For Trump, it was catnip—irresistible. He doesn’t want to be seen as a lame duck. He wants to seem invincible. But, more pertinently, he most definitely wants to be president forever because he is an authoritarian. Anything breathing life into that idea was going to set him off.

And so, after being asked by reporters on Air Force One about Bannon’s comments, Trump then mused about it the way I explained on Tuesday—not ruling it out while remaining vague, sending the message that he’d try. But that seemed to set off a chain of events in the GOP that shows why No Kings had such impact—and why Republicans have been deathly afraid of the protest and the message of the seven to nine million people who marched.

Trump was in Asia—all of his comments, including the backtrack, came while he was on Air Force One—so it may have been easier for White House operatives to work around Trump and organize a pushback, including getting someone to talk Trump himself down. Trump made the initial comments on Monday. By Tuesday afternoon, Mike Johnson killed the idea.

“It’s been a great run, but I think the president knows, and he and I have talked about, the constrictions of the Constitution, as much as so many of the American people lament that,” Johnson said during a news conference.

Trump was in Japan at the time. But Johnson said he spoke with him that morning. Clearly, killing this idea of Trump blowing through the 22nd amendment, becoming president again—and maybe for as long as he lives, like a king—was important enough for Johnson to speak with Trump about it while Trump was galavanting many time zones away.

“I don’t see a way to amend the Constitution because it takes about 10 years to do that,” Johnson said. “As you all know, to allow all the states to ratify what two-thirds of the House and three-fourths of the states would approve. So I don’t, I don’t see the path for that, but I can tell you that we are not going to take our foot off the gas pedal.”

Trump then followed suit in answers to a question on Air Force One on his way to South Korea, where President Lee Jae Myung knew how to work Trump, feeding his ego by giving him a replica of a crown worn by Korean kings in 5th and 6th centuries. That, of course, deliciously fed into No Kings, as the gift mesmerized Trump, who even said he wanted to put it on “right now.”

Trump told reporters it was “too bad,” but “based on what I read, I guess I’m not allowed to run. So we’ll see what happens.” Of course, that last line still leaves the possibility open—because Trump still wants people to think he’s a king.

Jonathan Karl of ABC told “Morning Joe” this week that Trump often talks with reporters on Air Force One about who should succeed him, asking if it should be Marco Rubio or Vance, suggesting Trump actually has always been planning on leaving. Per HuffPost:

Karl pointed to Trump’s question [about Rubio and Vance] as evidence that the president doesn’t really have “any designs on actually staying past the end of this term” despite his repeated talk of and hints at trying to stay in the White House for an unconstitutional third term.
Trump “tells people privately, people close to him, ‘No, no, I’m, you know, I’m done,’” Karl said on Tuesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe”…

Karl also suggested Bannon was stirring the pot in order to cause tension for the ambitious and super-dangerous Vance. Just this past Tuesday night Vance spoke at a Turning Post USA conference in Mississippi, where the young MAGA crowd was chanting, “Forty-eight! Forty-eight!”

So it’s quite possible Vance, feverishly working on getting the base behind him, was among those scrambling at the White House as Trump was traveling, doing what they could to tamp down any idea that Trump would run again, and bringing Mike Johnson in.

The GOP has a big problem: weaning the MAGA cult off of Trump and onto someone else. They must be talking about life after Trump, and they have to be worried about pushing a fantasy of Trump running again that doesn’t or can’t pan out. Trump may eventually draw them into some plan to keep him in office, as they’ve been drawn in to supporting many illegal things he’s initiated. For now, however, they’re surely thinking life after Trump.

But also, they know it’s toxic to have Trump talking about running for a third term as they are facing enormously tough elections, having already been brought down by Trump. As millions were set to march in No Kings rallies, the GOP was petrified of the message, doing what they could to demonize the protesters, none of which worked. Trump’s musings, inspired by Bannon’s claims, only added more fuel to that messsge of No Kings.

All of this is another example of why No Kings was so successful and will continue to be, and why we must keep marching strong.

Despite America's move toward authoritarianism under President Donald Trump, Vox writer Zach Beauchamp says that in analyzing two different researcher's approaches to the question, the "implications for the United States . . . are at once hopeful and disturbing."

Citing two studies focusing on "democratic u-turns" in which "a country starts out as a democracy, moves toward authoritarianism, and then quickly recovers," Beauchamp says "nearly 90 percent" of these "u-turns" were "short-lived mirages."

In the first study known as V-Dem, they found that these u-turns were very common, and that "over half of all countries that experience a slide toward autocracy also end up experiencing a U-turn."

The second study uses the V-Dem data to focus on post-1994 cases of these democratic u-turns and their aftermaths, and the results, Beauchamp writes, "weren't promising."

"Of the 21 cases, 19 countries experienced another decline in their democracy score within five years of the seemingly successful U-turn," he writes.

Marina Nord and Nic Cheeseman, researchers from the first and second research teams agree "that modern autocratization is different from the historical pattern," Beauchamp explains.

"Before the 1990s, democracies tended to be toppled by coups or revolutions — unmistakable uses of force that ended the current regime and replaced it with naked authoritarian rule," he writes.

Today's threats to democracies, Beauchamp says, "come in a more subtle and hidden form" known as "democratic backsliding" in which, like in Viktor Orban's Hungary and Trump's America, " a legitimately elected government changes the laws and rules of the political system to give itself increasingly unfair advantages in future elections."

"Because elected authoritarians were, well, elected, they often represent a real constituency in the country’s politics," Beauchamp explains.

"This support base is often large enough to make it 1) impossible for their opponents to defeat them permanently and 2) democratically illegitimate for said opponents to outlaw them entirely," he adds.

The parallels to Trump's America are staggering, but, according to both researchers, while "contemporary attempts to destroy democracy usually fail in the near term," they do tend to lead to future attempts down the line.

“Once you have a democracy, that doesn’t mean you automatically become a stable democracy,” Nord says, summarizing the points of agreement.

Political scientist Dan Slater coined the term "democratic careening," saying careening democracies are “struggling but not collapsing."

And that's where a picture of post-Trump America comes in, Slater says.

"A democracy may be liable to ‘capsize,’ or tip over temporarily so that democracy ceases to function for a limited time — but not to vanish from the democratic ranks entirely through a restoration and consolidation of authoritarian rule," he explains.

Beauchamp agrees, saying, "While President Donald Trump has developed an increasingly cogent plan for destroying American democracy, there are formidable obstacles in his path — including federalism, widespread public skepticism, a free press, and an independent judiciary."

The research suggests that many countries with fewer effective barriers against autocratization have resisted bids like Trump’s, which should give us some optimism that what’s happening right now isn’t the end of American democracy.

“I don’t think the US is beyond the point of no return,” Cheeseman says.

But even if America experiences a "u-turn" of its own, it's not out of the woods yet, Beauchamp says.

“There is a reason why Trump came to power, and there is a reason why he won those elections,” Nord says. “If you don’t solve the underlying reasons, then of course democracy will still be at risk.”