The thing about Donald Trump is that he is never actually kidding. Sure, he might say things with the cadence of a stand-up—and his supporters may laugh. But his “jokes,” if we want to call them that, are always more like trial balloons he floats out there to see what he can get away with. So when he muses about staying in office beyond the second term he won last week, there is no reason to take it as anything but an admission of his actual aspirations.
“I suspect I won’t be running again—unless you do something,” Trump told a crowd of giddy House Republicans Wednesday, as he took a victory lap in Washington. “Unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we have to just figure it out.’”
His GOP allies brushed it off: “That was a joke,” Tennessee Congressman Tim Burchett told the Hill. “It was clearly a joke.”
“You can’t even tell a joke without being excoriated,” Arizona Representative Eli Crane added.
But Trump has a long history of fantasizing about “extending” his presidency—and is already seeking to imbue it with powers outside the traditional checks and balances that underpin the American system of government.
Already facing little legal constraint, thanks to a Supreme Court ruling this summer that effectively put presidents above the law, Trump has sought in the days since his election to ensure there are few legislative guardrails in his path. He is pressuring Senate Republicans to allow him to make recess appointments, presumably to ensure Matt Gaetz, Pete Hegseth, and his other checkered nominees don’t have to face scrutiny in confirmation hearings—even though his party will enjoy a 53-47 majority. His aides, meanwhile, are targeting a 1974 budget law that would allow him to make government cuts proposed by Elon Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy without congressional approval, as the Washington Post reported Wednesday. Musk and Ramaswamy's so-called “efficiency” commission could, itself, act as a kind of power grab—giving untold influence to two allies outside the official government, and perhaps concentrating even more authority for Trump and his circle of loyalists.
Will he face any political restraints? The electorate gave him a governing trifecta—the White House and both chambers of Congress—and Democrats have limited recourse to rein him in. If there’s to be any real curb on his power, at least in the immediate future, it’ll have to come from Republicans. And while there’s been some GOP hand-wringing over a few of Trump’s early moves—the Gaetz pick for attorney general, in particular, has raised hackles—the party he remade in his image seems concerned with only one thing: “It’s nice,” as Trump told the House conference Wednesday, “to win.”
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