The Lincoln Logue | The Nation Goes Hungry While Trump Flirts with Another Term
Food aid stops, missiles fly, Trump jokes about ruling forever.
He said it like a joke, but every despot starts with a punchline. Trump’s latest flirtation with a third term wasn’t a slip — it was a test, a public stress check on the Constitution itself. “Too cute,” he called the idea of running as vice president, like the Bill of Rights were just a clever loophole waiting to be monetized. The crowd laughed, because they always do, even when the joke lands like a threat. He’s made a game of pretending tyranny is theoretical, and every smirk is a rehearsal for the moment it’s not. There’s no clearer confession of intent than a man who keeps daring the law to stop him. What used to be hyperbole is now governance by suggestion — authoritarianism in beta testing. Every punchline leaves a crack, and by the time the laughter stops, the foundation’s already shifting.
The fantasy of a forever presidency is no longer about ego; it’s about infrastructure. He’s spent the year turning the military into a campaign arm, the Justice Department into a defense fund, and the press into a prop. Each new overreach — from missile strikes on fishing boats to sending Army lawyers to prosecute migrants — blurs the line between state and self. Power’s become a private company, and the commander-in-chief is its only shareholder. When he jokes about running again, it’s because he knows he never really stopped. The absurdity has calcified into strategy, and the Constitution’s silence has become complicity.
And while the Constitution still sits behind glass, the glass is cracking. The shutdown grows longer, the economy shrinks smaller, and each branch of government bends closer to the executive’s will. This isn’t the slow death of democracy — it’s the casual one. Every unchecked act becomes the new normal, until the next breach feels like tradition.
Welcome back to The Lincoln Logue. Let’s get into it.
Monday, October 27 — Trump Thinks a VP Run is ‘Too Cute’
▌But running for a third term as President? He “would love” to.
Trump’s mid-air monologue turned the 22nd Amendment into a stand-up routine, a bit delivered somewhere between Malaysia and Tokyo for a press corps too conditioned to laugh on cue. He called the idea of running again in 2028 “too cute,” a phrase that sounded playful enough to pass and pointed enough to wound. It was a test — a trial balloon floated on the thin air of complacency, measuring how many chuckles the law can survive. He’s spent years disguising ambition as entertainment, turning sedition into programming the country watches live. Each laugh is an inch taken, each shrug another precedent quietly erased. What he calls charm is calculation, and the audience keeps buying tickets to the rehearsal for forever.
His allies now speak about eternity like logistics. Steve Bannon boasts of a “plan” to make him president again, a scheme that wraps blasphemy in bureaucracy and dares anyone to call it what it is. Behind him, Rubio and Vance grin for the cameras, apprentices pretending obedience is principle, their smiles the currency that keeps the fantasy funded. The party that once carried pocket Constitutions now carries talking points, preaching liberty while practicing servitude. Every nod becomes precedent; every silence a signature. They don’t guard the republic anymore — they curate it, trimming the parts that contradict their patron.
The threat isn’t a third term on paper but a third term already in progress. The government is shut down, workers are unpaid, and the machinery of state moves only where his ego demands motion. Power now performs instead of governs, the spectacle replacing the service, the crowd replacing the checks. He jokes about forever because repetition makes it reasonable. Every punchline rewrites another clause, every smile from his allies redraws a line. “Too cute” is just the brand name for a system learning to live without limits.
Source: Reuters