All right, which one of you clowns signed me up to receive mailings from the far-left Youth Save Democracy PAC? I suppose you think you’re very funny. But anyway, on Saturday, I received a breathless email from them, and it looks as if the sky is falling: “Robert,” it said chummily, “Donald Trump just said the quiet part out loud. In a recent interview, Trump openly mused about serving a third term as president - something explicitly forbidden by the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution.”
After that, they threw every typographical denotation of urgency at me, just so I’d know how serious they are: “This isn't a joke. This isn't hyperbole. This is Trump telling us exactly what he wants to do. And there's only one thing standing between Trump and unchecked power: the House of Representatives.”
Following that horror-of-horrors-the-sky-is-falling scenario was a pitch to give them money so that Democrats can take back the House in 2026. Now, if Trump really were the fascist dictator of the left’s fervid imagining, winning back the House wouldn’t help, but this mailing was actually only a mild helping of Trump-is-a-dictator hysteria. Has-been talk show host David Letterman was more direct last Tuesday, but after all, he is a relic of a more direct age. “He’s our dictator,” Letterman declared, adding: “He’s not going anywhere.”
Well, sure, except then you wake up. That is, then you wake up if you’re not a leftist who is so blinded by hatred and so indoctrinated with propaganda that you can’t see what’s right in front of you. As for the third term, Trump said this in late October: “I have my highest poll numbers that I've ever had, and, you know, based on what I read, I guess I'm not allowed to run. So, we'll see what happens. I would say that if you read it, it's pretty clear. I'm not allowed to run. It's too bad, but we have a lot of great people.”
Apparently, even wanting to remain in office is evidence of a dictatorial tendency, although no one was sounding the alarm about a dictator-in-the-making back in 2015, when Barack Obama said: “I am in my second term. It has been an extraordinary privilege for me to serve as President of the United States. I cannot imagine a greater honor or a more interesting job. I love my work. But under our Constitution, I cannot run again. I can't run again. I actually think I'm a pretty good President — I think if I ran, I could win. But I can't.”
Obama also famously said in late 2020, “I used to say if I can make an arrangement where I had a stand-in or front-man or front-woman and they had an earpiece in and I was just in my basement in my sweats looking through the stuff and I could sort of deliver the lines while someone was doing all the talking and ceremony, I’d be fine with that because I found the work fascinating.” Nobody uttered a word of protest, even in the face of hints that Obama rolled out exactly this plan between 2021 and 2025.
Now, in a discussion about sending criminal migrants back where they came from, would-be dictator Trump said: “If we have criminals that came into our country, and they were naturalized maybe through Biden or somebody that didn't know what they were doing, if I have the power to do it... I would denaturalize, absolutely!"
Related: Far-Left Senator Finds a Brand-New Reason to Be Enraged at Trump
“If I have the power to do it”? To hear leftists tell it, such matters never trouble Trump, who has supposedly run roughshod over all manner of checks and balances in the first year of his second term. In reality, however, with those eight words, spoken in passing, Trump exposed the hollowness of the left’s entire strategy at this point. Trump actually has repeatedly demonstrated punctilious respect for the Constitution and the rule of law, even to the point of obeying the politically motivated rulings of leftist judges who are trying to stop him from implementing his agenda.
The real dictator-in-the-making was Old Joe Biden, or rather, the people who were running the White House in those days. It was they who weaponized the Justice Department against their political enemies, worked with the social media giants to destroy the freedom of speech, and treated those who opposed their policies as if they were terrorists. When the Democrats call Trump a dictator, they are engaging once again in that time-honored tactic of accusing their enemies of what they themselves are guilty of doing. It isn’t the first time, and it won’t be the last.
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