Trump Encourages Terrifying Calls for Third Term at 100-Day Rally

To celebrate his 100th day in office, Donald Trump held a rally in Michigan—where he, his team, and his fans celebrated the idea of unconstitutionally keeping him in office for a third term.

At one point, Trump smiled as the crowd erupted into a chant, calling for him to stay in power.

“Three!” the crowd roared.

“Well, we actually already served three, if you count. But remember, I like the victories, I like the three victories which we absolutely had. I just don’t like the results of the middle term,” Trump said, continuing to ignore the fact that he lost the 2020 election to former President Joe Biden.

Over the last month, Trump has repeatedly said he was “not joking” about pursuing a third term in office. The language first appeared in March during a phone call with NBC News’s Kristin Welker, when he said that he was actually very serious about potentially circumventing the Constitution in order to lead the country for another four years after his second term ends.

“No, no I’m not joking. I’m not joking,” the president said at the time, agreeing with Welker that one such plan to keep him in office involved having Vice President JD Vance front the next Republican presidential ticket with Trump as his number two—roles that they would then switch once back in office.

But the alarming comment reappeared in an April 22 interview with Time magazine, when the president said, “There are some loopholes that have been discussed that are well known” for keeping him in power.

“But I don’t believe in loopholes. I don’t believe in using loopholes,” said the convicted felon, who has been accused of running scams and shams and was judged in September 2023 to have committed business fraud.

The non-loophole alternative to remaining in power would have Trump formally run for a third term—and would require a near-impossible amendment to the Constitution that would have to pass with the consent of most of the country.

As outlined in Article 5 of the Constitution, any such alteration requires at least two-thirds of the Senate and the House to agree on the modification, with that change then requiring ratification by a minimum of three-quarters of states in the nation.

A second approach to repealing the term-limiting amendment could be via a constitutional convention, though two-thirds of states would need to support the motion to have one at all, and any proposed changes to an amendment would still require ratification by three-fourths of the states.

Regardless of the enormous uphill climb, the business mogul is already making money off a potential third term and building his brand to remain in office in the process. Red caps reading “Trump 2028” in white lettering are retailing on the online Trump store for $50 a pop. In an interview with Axios, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said that the merchandise was “just a hat” and did not suggest that Trump was thinking of staying in office past his current term—though she didn’t neglect to insinuate the alleged popularity of such an idea, adding that the caps have been “flying off the shelves.”

But Trump’s bubble defies reality. Recent polling suggests that Trump’s popularity has nosedived in recent months, in large part due to his whiplash tariff proposals.

The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index fell by 7.9 points in April, bringing overall consumer confidence to 86, according to a report published Tuesday. Consumer futures were brought to a 13-year low, with outlooks on the economy dropping by 12.5 points to 54.5 points. That’s well below the threshold of 80 that “usually signals a recession ahead,” according to the Conference Board.

And an ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll published Sunday found that Trump’s approval rating had plummeted to 39 percent—a 6 percent drop from February—marking the lowest first-100-day rating of a president since modern polling began roughly 80 years ago.

Former CEO and current Trump Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick—who wants robots to replace the American worker and wants you to shut up and take your Social Security cuts—also wants a section of the population to commit generations of their families to working in factories.

“It’s time to train people not to do the jobs of the past but to do the great jobs of the future,” Lutnick said Tuesday on MSNBC while arguing for more community college education, before his argument got much worse. 

“This is the new model, where you work in these kind of plants for the rest of your life, and your kids work here, and your grandkids work here. You know, we let the auto plants go overseas. Right now you should see an auto plant, it’s highly automated but the people—the four, five thousand people who work there—they are trained to take care of those robotic arms, they are trained to keep the air conditioning system.” 

There’s nothing wrong with working in a factory, on its face. But Lutnick, the son of a college professor and the grandson of a dry-cleaning store owner, is suggesting that millions of people ought to commit to a generational lack of upward mobility under the guise of creating a new class of American labor. What Lutnick is so enthusiastically describing—being bound to the same job in the same industry for decades and decades—is serfdom. And that serfdom won’t even be widely available as automation takes over and the only job left is to watch the robots and make sure they don’t overheat. Howard Lutnick and Donald Trump view the domestic workforce as a homogenous, voiceless mass happy to live in the dreary mediocrity they’re forced into.  

Even Donald Trump’s favorite network is facing backlash for not bending the knee enough.

Speaking with Fox News on Tuesday, White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller unabashedly told the network that they should fire their pollster, notifying them that the White House “does not acknowledge” Fox’s negative polling about Trump.

The terse exchange followed a point-blank question by anchor John Roberts, who asked Miller to comment on polling data that indicated “a lot of people think [Trump’s] spending too much time on tariffs and not enough time on the economy and lowering prices.”

But Miller did not comment on the data. Instead, he opted to cut the network down a notch, leveraging Trump’s authority and base to suggest that the network take an even more sycophantic approach.

“I don’t want to make things weird for you, John,” Miller said. “But it is our opinion that Fox News needs to fire its pollster.”

“And I won’t surprise you with that, I don’t think you’re surprised that I’m saying that, but the Fox News pollster has always been wrong about President Trump,” Miller continued, harkening back to polling from last summer that suggested former Vice President Kamala Harris would win the presidential election.

“We don’t acknowledge any of that polling,” Miller added.

When Fox returned from a commercial break, Roberts noted that the network would continue to defend its work, regardless of the Trump administration’s prerogative.

“You might have been watching earlier when Stephen Miller joined us here on America Reports, he made a remark that was critical of our polling,” Roberts said. “But here at Fox News we stand by our polling as we always have.”

Unfortunately for Miller, Fox News isn’t alone. Multiple polls show Trump is deeply unpopular for his economic policies.

Miller previously served as the senior adviser for policy and White House director of speechwriting during Trump’s first term. The far-right politico has made a name for himself for his vicious anti-immigrant policies, which include proposals to build mass deportation camps and deploy the military and the National Guard to seal the border, promising a forthcoming reality of “large-scale raids” and “throughput facilities.”

He’s long been viewed as one of the most apparent and rigid ties between Trump and the white nationalist agenda. Miller, a mentee of Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, has had a profound impact on the president-elect’s language and policy on immigration, despite entering Trumpworld with little policy or legal expertise.

He was the architect of Trump’s first Muslim travel ban and has been a vocal proponent of family separation at the U.S. border, as well as limiting citizenship for legal immigrants. During his time in Trump’s first term, leaked emails revealed that Miller promoted white nationalist articles and books, especially on the idea that nonwhite people are replacing white people.

Miller’s rhetoric has been roundly condemned—including by his uncle, Dr. David S. Glosser, who in a scathing 2018 piece for Politico Magazine condemned his far-right relative as a hypocrite for drafting policy that would have prevented their own family from seeking refuge on America’s shores in the twentieth century.

This story has been updated.

Donald Trump’s choice for U.S. ambassador to China was confirmed Tuesday with the help of 16 Democratic votes in the Senate. 

David Perdue, formerly a Republican senator from Georgia, easily sailed through with a 67–29 vote, with four senators not voting. The Democrats who joined all but two Republicans to vote for Perdue weren’t only representing battleground states, either.

“Yea” votes included New Jersey’s Cory Booker, whose record-breaking speech on the Senate floor against Trump’s policies earlier this month seemed to inspire the rest of his party, as well as Illinois Senator Tammy Duckworth, a military veteran who has criticized the administration for firing military veterans from civil service positions.  

Perdue was confirmed while the U.S. and China are in the midst of a trade war entirely caused by Trump’s ill-conceived 145 percent tariffs against Chinese imports, which China has responded to with its own 84 percent tariffs against U.S. exports to the country. Somehow, 16 Senate Democrats agreed with Trump’s choice of Perdue to deal with Beijing during this manufactured crisis. Here are their names: 

1. Cory Booker—New Jersey
2. Chris Coons—Delaware
3. Tammy Duckworth—Illinois
4. John Fetterman—Pennsylvania
5. Ruben Gallego—Arizona
6. Maggie Hassan—New Hampshire
7. Tim Kaine—Virginia
8. Andy Kim—New Jersey
9. Angus King—Maine (independent who caucuses with Democrats)
10. Amy Klobuchar—Minnesota
11. Gary Peters—Michigan
12. Jack Reed—Rhode Island
13. Jacky Rosen—Nevada
14. Jeanne Shaheen—New Hampshire
15. Elissa Slotkin—Michigan
16. Mark Warner—Virginia

Consumer confidence in the economy has plummeted for the fifth straight month, sinking to lows not seen since the onset of the Covid-19 pandemic, all thanks to Donald Trump’s tariffs.

The Conference Board’s consumer confidence index fell by 7.9 points in April, bringing overall consumer confidence to 86, according to a report published Tuesday. Consumer futures were brought to a 13-year low, with outlooks on the economy dropping by 12.5 points to 54.5 points. That’s well below the threshold of 80 that “usually signals a recession ahead,” according to the Conference Board.

“The decline was largely driven by consumers’ expectations. The three expectation components—business conditions, employment prospects, and future income—all deteriorated sharply, reflecting pervasive pessimism about the future,” Stephanie Guichard, a senior economist at the Conference Board, said in a statement.

The number of consumers expecting fewer jobs in the next six months (32.1 percent) was particularly alarming, reaching heights not seen since April 2009, when the country was in the midst of the Great Recession.

“Expectations about future income prospects turned clearly negative for the first time in five years, suggesting that concerns about the economy have now spread to consumers worrying about their own personal situations,” Guichard noted.

The drop-off in confidence has rattled all ages and income groups, as well as all political affiliations. The group with the sharpest decline in confidence is also America’s most employed, people aged 35 to 55.

The root cause of the instability was “high financial market volatility in April,” which hit American consumers’ stock portfolios and retirement savings hard and fast, per the Conference Board’s report. That was almost singularly due to Trump’s machinations in the White House, which included releasing (and stalling) a sweeping and vindictive tariff proposal plan that economists observed (and the White House eventually confirmed) was founded on bad math.

It’s not the only negative indicator for Trump’s performance. An ABC News/Washington Post/Ipsos poll published Sunday found that Trump’s approval rating had plummeted to 39 percent—a 6 percent drop from February—marking the lowest first-100-day rating of a president since modern polling began roughly 80 years ago.