Steve Bannon Needs You To Believe A Third Trump Term Is Inevitable

There was a story floating around social media a while back about the American right’s attempts to dismantle the nation's education system in service of a deeply ignorant electorate that doesn’t know what it doesn’t know about the messiness of democracy and how shit is supposed to work in the United States. 

In that story, a college student – a kid from Texas A&M, I think – had complained to a professor about curricula that included something about trans people; this student said the professor should be careful not to run afoul of “the president’s law.” 

The president’s law. The. President’s. Law. The president's law.

It’s with this backdrop that Trump is going to try to run for a third term as president. I don’t think it counts as dooming to say there is no scenario in which the guy who has been stunned by how much leeway he’s been granted to wield absolute power is going to simply leave the White House – which he sees as his house – when the constitution says he can no longer live there. The man who has never observed a single constitutional norm is not going to start when someone says hello sir, another person has been elected to the position you occupy, it’s time to play golf for your remaining days. Trump, prompted by the right-wing hacks in the White House press pool, has openly opined about remaining president after the end of his second term. He said as much back in October 2024, when he faced the existential threat of losing the presidential race and facing prison for his many crimes against the country. 

Thanks to all those who support BFT. Consider subscribing for $3 or $5 a month, or leaving a tip!

“I shouldn’t have left,” Trump bemoaned in late October 2024 as polls remained close and the billionaire class – including Elon Musk, who controls the nerve center of American politics – tried their best to push Trump across the line in what can most accurately be described as a successful Business Plot. I’m sure Trump wondered more than once while he was in exile at Mar-a-lago with his worshippers and spies from various enemy nations: Who would have stopped me from staying? Who would have come into the White House and removed me? The answer, as you suspect, was no one. 

The state of democracy-understanding in the US has reached dangerous levels (it’s why we desperately need pro-democracy propaganda flooding every school district in the country). I’ve thought about that Texas A&M kid a lot. It’s not that you have to be smart to get into college (being “smart,” I think, is a choice; you can be smart if you want to be smart). Campuses today and campuses twenty years ago, when I was a college student, are filled with the most incurious people you’ll ever meet, dullards who are fine with being dullards as long as they get a degree and move on to the next stage of life: Happy consumer with a little money to burn.

But to be a college student and to utter the words “the president’s law” without any comprehension of how such a phrase undercuts the most basic idea of the separation of powers is another level of ignorance that scares the shit out of me. I can hope someone in that classroom corrected this kid – something as simple as, “The president does not make laws” would do – but I doubt this child’s monarchal interpretation of the U.S. Constitution saw any rebuttal at all. 

They’re called executive orders, kid, and they mean precisely fucking nothing. Go Aggies. 

What Kind of American Are You?

Americans need to be told they do not want to live in a version of the US in which they have to be the right kind of American to be treated equally, or without malice.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

I’m not going to waste time imagining what might unfold to unseat the first American president to refuse to leave office; these kinds of things get ugly in a hurry, though we do have enough good TV to watch if we want to ignore the true end of representative government. The 2023 movie Civil War imagined what it might look like for an American president to outright refuse to step down, if you’re interested in flooding yourself with bone-rattling anxiety. How to remove a despot from office is another goddamn bleak conversation for another goddamn bleak day. 

You might have seen Steve Bannon emerge from his fascist foxhole recently and announce that Trump would not only run for president in 2028, but that he would easily win and remain in power for years and years to come. In Bannon’s overactive imagination, the doddering old man taking dementia screening tests and describing them as difficult and undergoing MRIs just to see how perfect they turn out is locked into permanent power. It's already done, Bannon says. Don't even worry about it.

For some reason, Bannon, a podcaster, lands interviews in which he lays out a grand plan for the future of the US and the world at large – plans he's devised from his bunker while scrolling online. In his latest interview about somehow dictating America's future from behind a microphone, Bannon was dead certain that Trump would be president come 2029, using typically verbose language to describe the addled god-king as a “vehicle of divine providence” and an “instrument of divine will."

Like a lot of fascists, Bannon's will matches perfectly with God's will. It's a nice arrangement if you can swing it.

“There’s many different alternatives. At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan and President Trump will be the president in ’28," Bannon told The Economist in the haughty tones of a man who believes he is untouchable. “The country needs him to be president of the United States. We have to finish what we started.”

The Delusion of Permanent Victory

Bannon claims to be part of a legal team looking to deploy unimaginably bad-faith arguments to nullify the 22nd amendment – the one that limits presidents to two terms, the one for which major American media outlets are blissfully unaware. Certainly college kids don’t know about this little No Kings section of the constitution.

I would guess Bannon and others who want to melt down whatever remains of American self governance are crafting a legal argument that can pass muster with at least five of the anti-constitutionalist jurists sitting on the Supreme Court. That’s how it’s worked for the past few decades: Lawyers at right-wing legal think tanks devise slimy, bad-faith reasons to implement a right-wing agenda and present those arguments to a judge who will play ball. It’s how Americans lost abortion rights. It’s how we might lose same-sex marriage. It’s how John Roberts ruled Trump and only Trump could operate beyond the law. 

We Live In A Monarchy Now

Supreme Court conservatives’ judicial bad faith has curdled into something so dangerous it’s difficult to grasp. The Court’s far-right members on Monday gave Donald Trump immunity from prosecution, all but ending the constitutional order and plunging the United States into a pitch-black vortex of monarchy, in which the president is

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

Trump will get a third term, Bannon argues, through the “will of the American people.” This hints at an election of some kind, perhaps the kind we see in other competitive authoritarian states in which the opposition has to crawl through a hundred miles of broken glass to gain power. That would likely take the form of voter suppression and scare tactics like the ones we saw in heavily-Democratic cities on Election Day 2024. Perhaps you’re unfamiliar with this because it was of shockingly little interest to mainstream outlets that had decided Trump would be better for business – the business of clicks and views and attention on the endless dopamine drip this TV character provides. Pete Hegseth, who plays a character known as Secretary of War on TV, is already promising to deploy American soldiers to opposition strongholds during upcoming elections.

Bannon flailed when challenged about ignoring the 22nd amendment in the document he believes was written from God himself. He asked his questioners how American voters could be guilty of unconstitutional activities if they indeed find Trump fit for a third term. How can The People be wrong, he wondered.

The Worst Person You Know Is Making Good Points About Elon Musk

Elon Musk is speed running the process of small-d democratic collapse. It’s all part of the accelerationist plan.

Bad Faith TimesDenny Carter

“Can the American people tear up the constitution?” Bannon bellowed, fresh out of sober, legitimate legal arguments for how a president can simply remain in power beyond two terms. “The only way President Trump wins in 2028 and continues to stay in office is through the will of the American people. We’re going to be good there.” 

These anti-constitutionalist ravings are always rooted in the unshakable belief that Trump is the Sovereign, the living, breathing, McDonald's-devouring will of the American people. And it's utterly disconnected from what one might call on-the-ground reality. Trump's second term has spawned the largest protest movement in the country's history – one that, again, doesn't seem of much interest to the press – and led to some of the worst polling we've seen since the death march days of George W. Bush's two-term failure. This second term has radicalized large swaths of the country's voting public that now – finally – understand there is no going back to the comfort of pre-Trump norms.

The man who was all but appointed by Wall Street is nearly 20 points underwater on the economy, maybe because a Wendy's cheeseburger costs $13 and beef is almost double the price it was at the end of Biden's term. His made-for-TV attacks on immigrant communities and the unreality of American cities in flames is wildly unpopular with normies. Bannon and the rest of the regime's backers need a dystopian reality to take hold if he's going to justify a third Trump term as an emergency effort to save the country from itself. It's why the president's handlers, in lieu of presidential daily briefings, feed him a steady diet of AI videos depicting Mad Max America.

They're not going to get the unreality they require. Bannon is going to have to come up with something else if he wants to make real the false idea that 2024 marked the end of history, a total and permanent victory for the forces of autocracy that have been revived by the brain poisoning and soul destruction of social media. Look around and you'll see people waking up to the threat: Neighbors pushing back against the president's secret police invading their communities, folks preparing for the coming food shortages caused by the regime's refusal to fund SNAP, protesters using laughtivism to make a mockery of ICE and Homeland Security as they make their social media content for Elon Musk's website.

I've tried so very hard over the past six months to avoid a term I have no choice but to use here: These shit heads are high on their own supply. They really, truly believe there will be no opposition to a permanent Trump dictatorship. Their delusion is all consuming, it animates every moment of every day. Bannon and his buddies have somehow convinced themselves that the president's policies are broadly popular and his support is steadfast among those who voted for him in 2024 because they saw a fucking epic AI Trump video 48 hours before Election Day, or because they use major social media platforms that functioned as an extension of his campaign.

These people blow with the wind. They have no real politics, no foundational beliefs, no informed decision-making process. They are incomprehensibly ignorant. They call themselves independents because they have no interest in deciphering the difference between good and bad things; it's easier to say it's all the same and that you – who cannot be bothered with small matters like the continued existence of the republic – are above it all. You can see this manifested in guys like Joe Rogan and other meathead Manosphere bros, who don't seem entirely comfortable with the regime's ethnic cleansing project after enthusiastically backing the ethnic cleansing candidate last fall. We'll take what we can get, I suppose. These people will lose interest once they see Trump's populism was all in bad faith.

There will be a concerted, organized push to keep Trump in power. That much is certain. But as America's leading monarchist said in a recent panic-blog, this will require unspeakable actions that the regime and its TV characters have been unwilling to carry out in their elaborate fascism cosplay. Bannon can talk all he wants about a third Trump term, and we should laugh at his air of inevitability. We can respond to these various autocratic plans with one word: No.

Follow Denny Carter on Bluesky at @dennycarter.bsky.social.