President Donald Trump has repeatedly mused about remaining in office for more than two terms, assuming he even gets a second term since he faces a steep uphill battle in 2020, but former Arkansas Governor Mike Huckabee claims Trump is preparing to run again in 2024 and is somehow eligible for a third term.
In a pair of tweets on Thursday, Huckabee announced that he has been named to run Trump’s 2024 campaign even though there is no evidence that such a campaign exists. He followed up by declaring that Trump is eligible for a third term, using the investigations as an excuse to claim that time has been stolen from Trump’s presidency.
Greatly honored to be asked to chair @realDonaldTrump re-election campaign for @POTUS in 2024. Gives me lots of time to plan! By then the Dems wil no longer be a political party in America, replaced by the New Whig Party.
— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) December 12, 2019
I’ll be on @seanhannity 2nite @FoxNews at 9pm ET and will explain how @realDonaldTrump will be eligible for a 3rd term due to the illegal attempts by Comey, Dems, and media , et al attempting to oust him as @POTUS so that’s why I was named to head up the 2024 re-election.
— Gov. Mike Huckabee (@GovMikeHuckabee) December 12, 2019
The problem is that the Constitution expressly forbids presidents from serving more than two terms in office.
According to the 22nd Amendment:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.
Huckabee did go on to appear on Fox News with Sean Hannity on Thursday night, where he continued to insist that Trump is eligible for a third term even as Hannity wrote the whole thing off as one big joke meant to “trigger the libs.”
But tyranny is not a joke, and Trump has talked about violating the 22nd Amendment time and time again, even going so far as to say that the United States should have a president for life like China.
Huckabee may have meant his tweets as a “joke,” but this is dangerous talk, especially when you consider that Trump has upended many presidential norms and has violated the Constitution on more than one occasion, which is why he’s being impeached. His supporters are also likely to take this kind of talk seriously enough to commit violence to make it a reality. Experts already fear that Trump will refuse to hand power over peacefully if he is defeated in 2020. Should he win, he could become emboldened to stay in office as long as he wants, and people like Huckabee and Hannity will be only too happy to let him be the dictator he has always wanted to be.
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