He still has a party to deal with

There's another angle on Trump's "No I'm not joking [about a third term]" I didn't get to in an earlier piece, and it's more interesting than the first. Trump is a flat, predictable, one-dimensional character. Although he has the Republican Party in his suit pocket today, the party is multidimensional in that it contains unpredictable, off-the-record moveable parts, some of whose gears just might begin grinding against a delusional autocrat.

"Most Republicans aren’t openly clamoring for a third Trump term," writes Bulwark reporter Will Sommer. "But for now, most right-wing personalities are pushing 'Trump

2028' more as a way to own the libs rather than grappling with it seriously. On his online show Monday, Trump devotee Benny Johnson discussed the concept by pulling out a comically large prop salt shaker for a segment he calls 'Salt That Lib!'"

I would expect no other from Johnson, keeper of an adolescent mind and Trumpian brown nose which beams with an S.S. allegiance to his leader's germinant dictatorship as brightly as Donald's main boy, Charlie Kirk. (I give his sycophantic mind-mush credit, though. A community college dropout, he has managed to make millions through his diverse Turning Point USA schemes devoted to transforming thousands of susceptible young Americans into fawning Hitler Youths. Kirk's trick: He kills their brain cells with come-hither kindness.)

It's not just boyish "influencers" playing the salted lib game. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt recently scolded the press for "melting down" over Trump’s Sunday declaration that he's seriously considering a third term. Senate Majority Leader John Thune similarly messed with reporters by saying "You guys keep asking the question, and I think he’s probably having some fun with it, probably messing with you guys." (I love that "probably.")

There is, as Sommer observes, a tactical advantage to Trump's threat of another run: "[It] lets him avoid coming off as a lame duck." More threatening is the lackadaisical attitude of a sizable bunch of his supporters: They're "open to it." In a recent focus group of Trump voters, The Bulwark's Sarah Longwell asked if they were supportive of a third term. "No one was gung-ho about it. But no one ruled it out or said it was nuts and obviously illegal, either. Instead, the group as a whole adopted a 'wait and see' approach, saying they wanted to evaluate how Trump’s second term goes before backing him for another four years." With stunning dismissiveness of the U.S. Constitution, these voters may be amenable to another Trump run, but his diehard MAGA base would be gung-ho, no questions asked, no doubts harbored.

Curiously, Sommer conflates the two voting blocs. Of the focus group he writes, "To me, that’s a sign that a base of support would be there for another Trump run, since Trump has shown that he can retain his core supporters no matter what his actual performance is in office." The assessment is contrary to what the group averred — a "wait and see" approach. Trump "core supporters" are, as noted above, his MAGA base. They're the only supporters Trump would need, and they're in the bag. He shapes the "thinking" of this most adoring bloc and then caters to their whims. It's an almost laughable cycle of baiting and hooking the fish, which somehow his loudmouth bass fail to grasp.

MAGA controls the party in state after state, so here Sommer is correct in adding "that whatever squeamishness elected Republicans have with the idea of a third term, they will likely get on board if it came to it." It would be either get on board or get primaried, a sure loser given that MAGA voters are the ones who vote in the wretched things. Most or at least many congressional Republicans would know better — what's good for the country — then again, nothing is paramount to their reelections. With MAGA nipping at their heels, the nation's welfare would run second at best.

That's one scenario, carefully described as a "likely," meaning uncertain, one. Politico reports that Republicans are afraid Trump's tariffs "are likely to damage the president’s and the party’s popularity on inflation," the manufacturing sector is repeating its vanishing act after President Biden's resurrection of it and economic "forecasters have increased their expectations for either stagnant growth and higher prices — often referred to as 'stagflation' — or an outright recession." Should either forecast become fact, again it's "likely," or so it seems to me, that we'll see major cracks in third-term enthusiasm among today's congressional Trumpers. In any case, it'll be a fascinating story to watch unfold.

For now, shocking, is it not, that nervous GOPers can't see the reassuring wisdom imparted by WH press secretary Leavitt, who in her tender, unworldly 27 years has been steeped in nothing but far-right talking points; she's a colossal economus ignoramus who says of Trump and his sightless, dice-rolling tradesters, "They’re not going to be wrong. It is going to work." Yes and I thought the same in many a youthful crap game.

But to wrap up the matter of Trump's "No, no I'm not joking," there is one overriding reason that he is indeed serious, and yet it's often overlooked.

Unthinkable is that Trump will ever unclutch the authoritarian regime he could only dream of while exiled. It's his one triumph in a low and sordid life of screwing associates and screwing women not his family-valued wives and trying pathetically to be among the Big Apple's elites and strutting a know-nothing personality of peerless jackassery. In 2015 he strutted politically, but only as a publicity stunt. Now he's engulfed in a messianic delusion, one in which his sordid despotism is a blessing the country cannot live without. No, he'll never let loose of that, save for when his artery-clogging cheeseburgers and dozen daily Diet Cokes disabuse him of his blasphemous fanaticism in a potent, abrupt way.