‘A Credible Threat’: Conservative Ex-Fox News Bigwig Warns That Trump Might Be Serious About a Third Term

AP Photo/Alex Brandon

Chris Stirewalt, the NewsNation anchor who formerly served as Fox News’ political editor, urged Americans to take President Donald Trump’s talk about seeking a third term seriously in a new column for The Dispatch.

“There is a rhetorical conveyor belt on which Trump’s ideas, or as Vice President J.D. Vance might say, ‘desires,’ are carried out of the shadows of impossibility and into the broad daylight of inevitability. It starts as trolling or a joke, then becomes a bargaining position in service of a real policy issue—the old ‘seriously but not literally’ rope-a-dope—and then the last furlong is carried by an incredulous surprise that anyone would be shocked that he’s doing exactly what he’s been saying all along,” submitted Stirewalt. “From irony to strategy to reality”

The political analyst went on to chronicle how Trump had begun joking about a third term in 2020 and continued to tease both supporters and opponents alike with the prospect on the campaign trail last year, all while usually insisting he was only trolling. But after moving back into the White House, Stirewalt observed, he’s been toying with refusing to leave in a more palpable way:

Then we got to the bargaining part, as Trump used the idea of another run as a deflection to a question about whether he would endorse Vance as his successor. Trump, don’t you see, is just keeping his options open.

The president trotted it out twice more soon after, where else but at the National Prayer Breakfast and a Black History Month celebration? And as Trump pushed the idea, his normie defenders dismissed the anxieties about Trump running again, changing the Constitution, or looking for some legal loophole as preposterous.

Right up until this week, when Trump told NBC News, “No, no, I’m not joking,” about the third term. “There are methods which you could do it, as you know.”

Ulp.

“The press did the same thing with Trump’s stubborn refusal to say that he would accept the results of an election he lost. It was a troll. It was a negotiating position. It was an attempted coup. This time, as the conveyor belt started lurching under our feet, most in the media went along for the ride on the third-term talk,” argued Stirewalt before concluding that “the most likely scenario still has to be that Trump will be a true lame duck after the midterms and finds his power substantially diminished in divided government. But a third term is worth treating as a credible threat.”