“Trump would … ”

by David Benjamin

“Winning isn’t everything. It’s the only thing.” —Vince Lombardi

MADISON, Wis.—Right around the time he applies his Sharpie to an edict changing the name of Canada to Trumpanada and sending the North Dakota National Guard to invade Saskatchewan, Donald Trump is going to run out of weird-ass “executive orders” to dream up and sign.

Long before that fateful moment, he’ll be bored silly with the presidency. He’ll have nothing left to do but govern—a skill he has disdained since, well, kindergarten. He’ll be jonesing for something else to do, not in Washington. He knows what he likes. He’s made that clear. Trump’s gonna run for president.

Of course, he has never even slowed this runaway escalator. Since his Trump Tower descent in 2015, he has never stopped campaigning. Lately, a lot of naifs in the political and judicial spheres are blithely mentioning the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, which seems to stipulate that after two terms a president has to get the hell out of the White House and not come back.

C’mon man! Trump’s gonna give a rat’s ass about the Constitution? With six Supreme Court justices tucked into his tidy whities?

Every day, I read pundits who intimate that Trump has orderly plans for his current reign. They think he’s going to formulate “policies” and stuff like that. Their sentences tend to begin with the phrase, “Trump could…” They postulate strategies, talks with Congressional leaders, Oval Office negotiations, outreach to an array of stakeholders in the conduct of America’s domestic and foreign affairs.

Fuggedaboudit. All this hopeful advice sounds too much like work, offered to a guy who has not put in an honest day’s labor since he licked clean the silver spoon in his mouth, banged his high-chair and hollered, “More!”

Trump’s “government” model is “The Apprentice,” where he’s the absolute boss enthroned at the top of a hundred-foot table lined with supplicants, each desperate for his favor, all of whom he can fire with a sneer and a snigger. But Washington is neither a mansion in Jamaica Estates nor NBC-TV. Since Election Day, instead of mugging for the camera and gloating over ratings, he’s catching hell from CNBC and losing lawsuits to federal judges, some of whom he personally appointed. People are taking to the streets to protest his rule and there are Republicans whose pants are fraying at the knees. Washington is turning into Trump’s purgatory. The White House is too far from the deluded mob who call him Messiah and blow their egg money to buy his MAGA tchotchkes. He needs his believers. He needs them close. He needs to see them, hear them, smell them.

He’s gotta get outa this place.

If anyone dares doubt that Trump is spoiling for a third term and an imperial presidency unto death, consider Elon Musk, a primadonna of epic ego whose only parallel in megalomania is Trump himself. Musk is the sort of larger-than-life figure whom Trump would normally keep at arm’s length, lest Musk’s celebrity outshines his own tangerine glow. But in Trump’s second season, Elon is the backup quarterback. He’s Cardinal Richelieu. He’s the Inquisition. He’s Reinhard Heydrich. Like Trump, Musk loves to kick ass, take no names and shatter the lives of lesser humans. Unlike Trump, however, Musk is (relatively) young and robust, with a personal platoon of high-tech sociopaths who gleefully obey his every beck and call. (Think of Jack Black in Enemy of the State.)

With Musk as his Energizer Bunny, Trump doesn’t have to languish in D.C., doing the dirty work, catching flak from Schumer, watching his poll numbers tank while protesters run wild in the streets. Trump can go back to MAGA-Land, where he belongs, where stadiums overflow and vast throngs chant his name, where his face is on the flag and where—everyone knows—he’s George Washington, Andy Jackson, Abe Lincoln and Elvis Presley all rolled into one magnificent richer-than-God populist in a blue suit with a phallic red necktie and a trophy wife.

There will be rallies. They will be soon.

But there’s a hitch. Admit it though he will not, Trump has never been a popular guy. His approval, which topped off below fifty percent, is sinking. It will continue to subside as he ages into decrepitude and struggles every day to cover his expanding bald spot. Fair and square, he cannot win another election.

But never mind that. Trump’s lickspittles in Congress are already drafting a law that allows a third campaign for a president elected to two non-sequential terms. More important, there will be cases brought by Trump’s lackeys in the Department of Justice that declare the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution unconstitutional. Even more important, the Trump Court will hear these cases on an “emergency” basis and rule that, yes, Congress and the states that ratified that misbegotten amendment were overreacting emotionally to the hellish twelve-year Marxist-Leninist dictatorship of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

Six to three.

There will be rallies, dozens of them, everywhere. Each speech will be vindictive, mendacious, tediously redundant and hours long, testing the stamina of even the devoutest Trump cultists. It will become obvious that even the Dear Leader’s lovingest zealots are bored with hearing the same bullshit over and over.

Even Trump will notice. But he won’t worry. Well before the 2028 election—perhaps even before the midterms—the Senate’s MAGA caucus will have already packed the courts with another hundred or so Trump-beholden Aileens. Election laws in every state will change. Propertied white males will be welcome at polling places, with no need to show ID. They’ll vote early—and often. The rest of us will be subject to a poll tax that had to be paid ten months before. Voters who miraculously paid the tax will have to pass a literacy quiz. A tiny handful who remember the vice president under Chester A. Arthur (a trick question, by the way) and the conversion formula for fluid ounces into milliliters will be cast nevertheless from polling places if they fail to present their original birth certificate—notarized within the last week by an administrative judge in the state capital. There will be blood tests. There will be urine samples. There will be GOP poll-watchers, in body armor, with AR-15s, shouting “Up against the wall!” Poll workers will applaud.

I exaggerate.

But how much?

If his opponents have not yet prepared to contest Trump’s third (and fourth) term, they’re already late to the ball. Every Democrat with thoughts of running in ’28 should be poised to announce his or her candidacy—tomorrow. The DNC should have already scheduled the first Democratic debate—focused on Medicare, Social Security, the VA and Elon Musk—before Memorial Day 2025.

Which will be too late.

With Donald Trump staging rallies for the next four years, his opposition must be conducting its own four-year campaign, in stadiums and on the national mall, on television and podcasts, on social media and on the phone, door-to-door, street corner-to-street corner, Thanksgiving-to Thanksgiving.

Donald Trump doesn’t want to slog to work every day in the Oval Office in service to the American people. As he has so often stated, service is for suckers. Work is what losers do. Deals are what winners do. Bullies win.
All Trump wants to do, for the rest of his criminal career, is win. He can’t win if he doesn’t run.

Ready or not, here he comes. He’s already running. The rest of us poor, bewildered bastards are already behind.