Over the weekend, President Donald Trump once again flirted with the idea of running for a third term, not ruling it out entirely in an NBC News interview.
But on Monday, presidential historian Tim Naftali told CNN that after the ratification of the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, term-limited presidents have no legal way to stay in power. He pointed out that short of the arduous process of amending the Constitution (which involves getting two-thirds support among state legislatures and two-thirds support from both chambers of Congress), Trump will have no choice but to leave the White House in January of 2029.
"President Trump does not have the Constitutional cards in this case," Naftali said. "There are only two scenarios by which you could constitutionally alter the the Constitution and allow him to run for a third term, and they both involve finding 38 states. Donald Trump knows that there aren't 38 red states."
CNN host Brianna Keilar then asked Naftali about the scenario in which Trump could mimic Russian President Vladimir Putin, who was prime minister under Dmitry Medvedev and ran the government behind the scenes before once again ascending to the presidency for yet another term. Keilar posited that Trump could run as Vice President JD Vance's running mate in 2028, only for Vance to then resign if elected and allow Trump to once again occupy the White House for four more years. However, Naftali threw cold water on that idea.
"The 12th amendment of our Constitution stipulates that no one can be a vice presidential candidate if they're not Constitutionally eligible to be president," he said. "That kind of Putin-Medvedev scenario is not possible in our country."
But the historian and New York University associate professor then pivoted to what he viewed as the most pressing question, which is: "Why is he talking this way?" Naftali explained that Trump "knows he doesn't have 38 states" and said that his talk of a third term has just three possible explanations. He added that the third option had particularly dark implications.
"One: Political theater. Donald Trump likes attention. He likes the fact we're talking about him right now. Maybe he's also hoping some people are going to say some things that are a little bit outrageous, which he can use to fundraise," he explained. "Number two, we're living in a in an increasingly evident culture of impunity. The president is using fear to get his way with universities, to get his way with law firms, to get his way with Congress, to get his way with Canada and Greenland and Panama and Ukraine. He's on a roll. And so why not talk about what he really wants, which is to stay in office as long as he can? The third is the January 6th scenario that the president, when he was in his first term, was capable of pushing for an unconstitutional and/or illegal way of staying in office. And maybe he is signaling to his supporters: 'Start thinking about ways we can stay through 2028 and 2029.'"
Reprinted with permission from Alternet.
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MAGA Heart Of Darkness III: Hitler's Ice Cream Meets Bronze Age Pervert
Costin Vlad Almariu
Welcome to the final installment of your Freakshow guide to the extremely online Nazi influencers of Trumpworld. It’s been a sickening tour, so take your anti-nausea meds one more time, and let’s get cracking...
First, an update on Canadian racist Geoff Martin, who we covered two weeks ago. Martin, who calls himself Captive Dreamer, includes Vice President JD Vance, Elon Musk, and other high-profile Trumpies among his fans. But you will recall that Dreamer/Geoff’s day job was office drone at Canada’s largest Christian university, Western Trinity – an institution presided over by his own father.
After Geoff was outed, his father Todd Martin renounced his spawn’s views, albeit without naming him. In a video posted online, the senior Martin said, in part: “I reject white supremacy and any ideology that elevates one group of people over another. I denounce the use of derogatory and disparaging labels and language and any attempts to dehumanize another individual or group. I strongly oppose the use of social media as a means of spreading such harmful ideas.”
(FWIW, your Freakshow author reached out to the university’s media office inquiring about whether Geoff Martin is still employed. Their reply: “As a matter of policy and in compliance with the Personal Information Protection Act, we cannot disclose personal information about current or past employees. However, we can confirm that no individual by that name is employed by the university.”)
Dad’s renunciation didn’t sit well with Dreamer’s online fans. American racist influencer Mike Cernovich called Martin’s video “a degrading struggle session imposed on him.” As if the president of a university (“Christian,” no less) that advertises its “inclusivity” could maintain his position without denouncing the odious public views of his spawn.
Dreamer belongs to a pack of non-American influencers with advanced degrees who don’t all vote here but who have been drooling over the prospect of a fascist America for years. We’ll have one more quick look at two of them here before we bid them all good riddance (for our reading purposes at least – when it comes to the Trump administration, they don’t seem to be going anywhere).
The king of MAGA’s online fascists is a Romanian named Costin Vlad Almariu. Almariu, born in Bucharest in 1980, is a greasy hyper-misogynist racist, with a Yale PhD in political science, who posts a lot of photographs of oiled-up bodybuilders in Speedos. He argues that modernity has stripped (white) men - especially progressive men - of their manliness.
No “I like beer” Trumpworld frat boy’s shelf is without his best-selling 2018 manifesto, Bronze Age Mindset. The tome has been compared to a modern, non-German Mein Kampf. His ideas have even earned him an ism - BAPism, which stands for “Bronze Age Pervert” per Almariu’s Xitter handle. Bronze Age Mindset’s ironic tone and elevated vocabulary gild the savagery of his ideas (boiled down by him to “the desire to be worshipped as a god”).
Like last week’s Freak, Trump’s Under Secretary of State for Public Affairs and Public Diplomacy Darren Beattie, Almariu believes anyone who isn’t white is naturally inferior, and that “Black Africans, in particular, are so divergent from the rest of humanity that they exceed the threshold commonly used in other species to draw sub-species boundaries.”
BAPists also presume self-reliant women are the cause of all modern male problems. Almariu’s personal misogyny is bottomless. He loathes us, routinely referring to us as “grils” or with the obscene insult “roasties” or, if he paid one, “prosties.” On International Women’s Day last week, he tweeted a picture of a woman eating raw tuna, with the caption: “Highly repulsive. I will generally not see a gril again after she eats in front of me. I stopped seeing a favorite prostie after I made the mistake of having delivery sushis with her at my place.”
Almariu’s 186,000 followers include Trump Junior, Vance, and many mod Nazi fellow travelers like Charles Cornish-Dale, another offshore fascist who spews into the U.S. radicalization pipeline under the username Raw Egg Nationalist on Xitter. “Yes, disgusting’” Raw Egg responded to BAP. “Eating is a big test of compatibility. How a woman holds a knife, whether she takes time eating her food, small gestures like using napkin properly, etc.”
Delicate, napkin-noticing Brit Cornish-Dale is another MAGA favorite (followed by Musk, Vance, Trump Junior, and Silicon Valley billionaire Marc Andreessen). As recently as last fall, Trump Junior was retweeting Raw Egg’s bullshit about FEMA and DEI programs.
He has an Oxford PhD (his thesis was on the religious history of an English parish), and now edits and writes a hilariously homoerotic (given Cornish-Dale’s other sentiments) magazine called Man’s World, with covers that include AI-generated classical male nude sculpture with futuristic eye beams and an apparently erect member. A British anti-hate group that outed him reports that he lives at home with his mommy in England.
Devoted to the goal of “superlative male flourishing,” Cornish-Dale advocates “slonking” 36 raw eggs a day among other wackadoodle muscle-building cures. Tucker Carlson featured him in his ball-tanning documentary on men not long before Fox sacked him.
Cornish-Dale has promoted Mein Kampf, eugenics, and the great replacement conspiracy theory. In a recent issue of his magazine, he posted a recipe for Hitler’s ice cream - Panzerschokolade - a concoction of cocoa powder and speed that gave the brave frontline Nazi tank troops more energy! (see below)
Last week, Cornish-Dale posted an AI “portrait” of JD Vance, his pudgy face slimmed down and decked in mutton chops and 19th-century colonial uniform, leaning on a sword, with an Indian woman coiled at his feet.
Cornish-Dale, Almariu and Martin, all born or living abroad, are invested in the American fascist experiment and are engaged with, platformed, and retweeted by men with immense power over global affairs, national policy, and American people’s freedom of speech, assembly, and the pursuit of happiness. They radicalize American Trump racists suffering from the Obama Derangement Syndrome that has motivated MAGA since 2015.
For decades after 9/11, the U.S. government blew tens of millions of taxpayer dollars into anti-radicalization efforts aimed at Islamic extremists. Meanwhile, this clan formed and spewed scholarly Nazism and Euro-fascist crap into the American mainstream. They are empowered by and influencing an administration that claims to see anti-Semitism on every campus and is weaponizing that accusation to deport people, all while refusing to call a Nazi salute a Nazi salute.
These freaks remind us that whatever the appeasers (ADL, Bari Weiss) want to pretend, the sieg heil means exactly what it always has: jackboots, thugs, and mass murder.
Nina Burleigh is a a journalist, author, documentary producer and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.
Reprinted with permission from American Freakshow.
