President Trump bizarrely spoke about being in his third term as president at a White House event on Tuesday.
Trump was speaking to reporters at the White House about a new anti-fraud program at the Department of Justice, and as usual, he went off-topic.
“So we have now a border that’s as strong as we’ve ever had by far. It’s been that way since the very beginning of my second term, or third term, depending on the way you want to define it, and I don’t want the results of this; I’d like the third term but I don’t want the results of the second term,” Trump said, alluding to the false idea that he should have won the 2020 presidential election but was thwarted by election fraud.
Trump went on to brag more about border security and make false claims about the economy going well, but his mention of a third term is sure to invite speculation about whether he plans to flout the Constitution and try to run for president again. There’s also the fact that he’s repeating false election conspiracies as a pretext to interfere in November’s midterms.
Federal officials are seizing voting machines and ballots, trying to grab voter rolls without legal justification, and bringing Democratic states to court based on flimsy evidence. Are all of these attempts at averting massive Republican losses in two weeks Trump’s way of ensuring he can do what he wants as president?
So far, Trump’s agenda has only been limited by the courts, with Republicans in Congress reluctant to rein him in on any of his bad decisions, from the Iran war to his whimsical tariffs. He probably sees a GOP-controlled Congress as the only way to keep acting with impunity and avoid any kind of checks on his power, including violating the Constitution.