America After Trump
President Donald Trump is not much of a humorist, yet he never tires of joking that he might not leave office.
Toasting Chinese President Xi Jinping at Mar-a-Lago in March 2018, Trump said: “He’s now president for life. President for life … I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”
At a rally in Elkhart, Indiana, two months later, Trump mused about getting an “extension” of his presidency beyond the eight-year constitutional maximum.
This May, he retweeted Jerry Falwell Jr.’s suggestion that Trump should get a two-year extension of his first term as “reparations” for what Falwell called “the corrupt failed coup”—the special counsel’s investigation and related inquiries.
In July he tweeted jokingly (“just kidding”) about staying in office for “10 or 14” more years.
Even on the verge of an impeachment inquiry, in September, Trump enjoyed the familiar joke once more, this time with the head of the soccer association FIFA. “We’re going to have to extend my second term because [of] 2026,” the year the World Cup will return to North America, he said. “I’m going to have to extend it for a couple of years.”
Meanwhile, the president’s hopes of retaining office by legal means for even four more years seem to be dwindling. The impeachment process points toward a removal trial in 2020. The economy softened midway through 2019. As of early fall, the president’s decisive to his Electoral College victory in 2016: negative eight points in Pennsylvania, negative 10 points in Michigan, and negative 11 points in Wisconsin.
