Podcaster Steve Bannon said he has a plan that would allow President Donald Trump to serve another term in office ― and critics are warning Americans to take that threat very seriously.
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“He’s gonna get a third term,” Bannon said in an interview with The Economist published Thursday. “Trump is gonna be president in ’28, and people just ought to get accommodated with that.”
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He didn’t offer specifics on how that would be accomplished, given that the Constitution explicitly rules that out for Trump.
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“There’s many different alternatives,” Bannon said. “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan.”
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But he did offer some hints when asked about the specific wording on the 22nd Amendment, which states: “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.”
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“We will define all those terms,” said Bannon, a longtime Trump insider who helped him win the presidency in 2016 and served in the White House during part of his first term. Bannon also called Trump a “vehicle of divine providence” and “instrument of divine will” who needs “at least one more term.”
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Critics were quick to call him out on that. “Ok this is getting creepy,” wrote Ruth Ben-Ghiat, an expert in authoritarianism and author of Strongmen: Mussolini to the Present.She added: “In #Strongmen, I state that propagandists present autocrats’ actions as ‘sanctioned by a higher power’ and the fruit of ‘divine blessing.’”
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Even if the constitutional issues were somehow resolved, Trump will turn 82 before Election Day in 2028 and would be the oldest-ever sitting US president even without a third term.
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Should he find a way to serve another term, Trump ― who is already facing questions about his health ― would serve until the age of 86.Trump himself has talked up a third term, has Trump 2028 merch available, and toldNBC Newsin March that he wasn’t “joking” about the possibility of staying in office. Critics fired back on social media:
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This article originally appeared on HuffPost.
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