Steve Bannon Is Already Setting the Stage for a Third Trump Term

Donald Trump hasn’t yet begun his second term, but his allies are already setting the stage for a third administrative run under the president-elect.

Speaking at the New York Young Republican Club on Sunday, War Room podcast host and former Trump adviser Steve Bannon suggested that conservatives should rally to keep the MAGA leader in power via a supposed loophole in the U.S. Constitution.

“Donald John Trump is going to raise his hand on the King James Bible and take the oath of office, his third victory and his second term,” Bannon said at the club’s annual gala.

“And the viceroy Mike Davis tells me, since it doesn’t actually say consecutive, that, I don’t know, maybe we do it again in ’28?” Bannon continued, referring to one of Trump’s former attorney general hopefuls. “Are you guys down for that? Trump ’28?”

It’s not even the first time this year that conservative figureheads have argued in favor of violating the Constitution to upgrade Trump’s authoritarian power.

The Twenty-Second Amendment, which was ratified in 1951, states that “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.” Congress pushed for the term limit after President Franklin D. Roosevelt served three terms through World War II, fearing future abuses of power.

Only one clear exception exists for a person to serve more than two terms: a vice president who claims the Oval Office through succession after the death or resignation of a president could go on for another two terms, if and only if their initial time at the top of the executive branch lasted less than two years.

But in April, a feature story in The American Conservative flat-out advocated for the total repeal of the Twenty-Second Amendment, arguing that the country should override the shackles of the two-term limit on the basis that the authors of the amendment couldn’t have predicted the allure of a far-right candidate with a frenetic base.

“If, by 2028, voters feel Trump has done a poor job, they can pick another candidate; but if they feel he has delivered on his promises, why should they be denied the freedom to choose him once more?” American Conservative contributor Peter Tonguette wrote at the time.

Next up on Donald Trump’s lengthy Executive Office to-do list: Stop the clock.

“The Republican Party will use its best efforts to eliminate Daylight Saving Time, which has a small but strong constituency, but shouldn’t!” Trump wrote in a Truth Social post Friday. “Daylight Saving Time is inconvenient, and very costly to our Nation.

His promise would make Standard Time, which we are currently in and which people overwhelmingly hate due to the increased darkness, permanent.

Proponents for Daylight Saving Time argue that the country uses less energy by extending the long summer sun an hour later into the evening. That was the reason behind Congress’s opt-in to Daylight Saving Time during World War I and World War II, according to Seize the Daylight author David Prerau.

That rationale hasn’t exactly held up—a 2008 study by the Department of Energy found that the clock switch saves a minuscule amount on the country’s annual energy usage—approximately 0.03 percent—while another study that same year out of the University of California-Santa Barbara suggested that Daylight Saving Time could actually cost the country more than not switching the clocks at all. Still, the majority of Americans want to make it permanent.

Trump’s sudden rejection of Daylight Saving Time is a near-total reversal of where he stood on the issue in 2019.

“Making Daylight Saving Time permanent is O.K. with me!” Trump wrote at the time.

But you don’t have to search far to figure out why Trump might have changed his mind. Tech billionaire Elon Musk, who has spent a considerable amount of time at Trump’s side in recent months, has been a vocal opponent of the time change. Earlier this month, Musk and Vivek Ramaswamy, the other co-chair of Trump’s not-yet-real nongovernmental commission—the Department of Governmental Efficiency, or DOGE—voiced their support for abolishing Daylight Savings Time.

“Looks like the people want to abolish the annoying time changes!” Musk responded to an X poll indicating that the site’s users were no longer in favor of the back-and-forth.

“It’s inefficient & easy to change,” Ramaswamy responded.

Of course, any concrete change to the country’s official clock would have to pass through Congress—though the increasingly MAGA complicit Republican Party would be in for a rude awakening if it approved the “permanent” jump. America last tried this experiment in 1974, when officials discovered that the only thing less popular than permanent Daylight Saving Time was ending it, with support for the permanent switch falling from 79 percent to just 42 percent within three months, The New York Times reported that year.

Dr. Mehmet Oz, the daytime television host Donald Trump has picked to run the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services, or CMS, may have a direct financial stake in three companies that would do business with the agency he intends to run.

A review of Oz’s 2022 tax disclosure by Accountable.US revealed that the Trump ally owned up to $26 million stake in Sharecare, a digital health company co-founded by Oz that operates CareLinx, the “exclusive in-home care supplemental benefit program” used by 1.5 million Medicare Advantage enrollees. The company went private in 2024, so it’s unknown whether Oz still owns a stake in the company.

Novo Nordisk, which produces Ozempic and Wegovy among other drugs, is also a client of Sharecare. As head of CMS, Oz has considerable impact on the pharmaceutical industry—but with business ties like these, it’s equally likely that these drug companies could have a profound impact on him.

Oz’s transition team spokesperson, Nick Clemens, told USA Today Friday that Oz had sold off his stake in Sharecare, but did not speak to the other stocks Oz owned with ties to the insurance industry.

In 2022, Oz also owned a stake valued at between $280,000 and $600,000 in UnitedHealth Group and between $50,000 and $100,000 in CVS Health, both of which provide insurance plans for roughly 41 percent of all Medicare Advantage enrollees as of 2024.

Oz also disclosed owning a stake valued at up to $25 million in Amazon and up to $5 million in Microsoft, which operate CMS’s “two primary cloud service providers,” according to its most recent budget.

Accountable.US did not find any indication that Oz had sold these stocks, and it was not confirmed by his spokesperson.

Sam Altman has joined the growing list of billionaires genuflecting before Donald Trump.

Fox Business reported Friday that the tech founder will personally be donating $1 million to the presidential inaugural committee. “President Trump will lead our country into the age of AI, and I am eager to support his efforts to ensure America stays ahead,” Altman said in a statement.

We’ll have to see if the donation smooths over Altman’s rocky relationship with fellow OpenAI co-founder and President-elect Trump’s self-styled “first buddy,” Elon Musk.

Musk left OpenAI in 2018, reportedly after his fellow founders shot down a proposal to let him run the company himself. Musk has since taken shots at Altman (and launched his own AI company), but their feud has heated up in recent months. Musk sued OpenAI in March, alleging it violated its nonprofit principles, and his criticisms of Altman have taken on a distinctly Trumpish flavor: The world’s richest man and unofficial Trump co-president recently dubbed Altman “Swindly Sam.”

But with a second Trump administration on the horizon, plutocrats’ past beefs with Trumpworld are magically disappearing. The announcement of Altman’s $1 million donation to the upcoming inauguration follows reports of Mark Zuckerberg and Jeff Bezos doing the same, despite their past run-ins with Trump.

Zuckerberg, who has called Trump “badass” even as Trump threatened him with imprisonment for supposed election interference as the owner of Facebook, will donate to the inauguration fund through Meta. Jeff Bezos—who has long been lampooned by Trump as the owner of The Washington Post—tanked the Post’s 2024 endorsement of Kamala Harris at the last minute in November. He will be donating his million via Amazon.

Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton has taken the Lone Star State’s abortion battle to the national stage, suing a New York doctor for prescribing the abortion pill to an in-state resident.

New York’s state law protects doctors and providers providing abortion care from out-of-state investigations and prosecutions, making the Empire State a home base for companies shipping out the abortion pill to consumers around the country.

Paxton has accused Dr. Margaret Carpenter of mailing the pills to a Collin County resident who allegedly consumed the medication when she was nine weeks pregnant, reported The Texas Tribune. The lawsuit does not mention if the woman was successful in terminating her pregnancy.

Now Paxton is asking the county court to order Carpenter to pay $100,000 for every violation of the state’s near-total abortion ban. (Violators of the draconian abortion law could also serve up to life in prison and have their Texas medical license revoked.) The lawsuit is the first attempt to enforce a state abortion ban beyond its borders.

“Abortion is, and will continue to be, legal and protected in New York. As other states move to attack those who provide or obtain abortion care, New York is proud to be a safe haven for abortion access,” wrote New York Attorney General Letitia James in a statement responding to Paxton’s lawsuit. “We will always protect our providers from unjust attempts to punish them for doing their job and we will never cower in the face of intimidation or threats. I will continue to defend reproductive freedom and justice for New Yorkers, including from out-of-state anti-choice attacks.”

The two-drug prescription commonly referred to as the “abortion pill” is a mixture of mifepristone and misoprostol. The procedure accounts for more than half of all the abortions in the United States, according to a 2022 report by the Guttmacher Institute, and has become a crucial tool as abortion restrictions limit access to in-person medical visits. It is more than 95 percent effective at ending pregnancies when used before 10 weeks of pregnancy, according to statistics by the American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists.

Access to mifepristone has become an increasingly fraught political issue in the years since the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade in 2022. In October, the attorneys general of Kansas, Missouri, and Idaho—a cohort of states with some of the most draconian abortion restrictions in the nation—sued the federal government to limit access to the drug, arguing that the medication should be illegal for minors (misoprostol is fully legal as it is used for other treatments).

The suit also accused the Food and Drug Administration of having “unlawfully removed its prohibition against mailing abortion drugs,” allowing what the attorneys general described as a “a 50-state abortion drug mailing economy” to undermine their states’ abortion laws.

But their moral ground for pushing the ban was seemingly less focused on protecting children’s health than it was on actually creating more children, with the lawsuit detailing the (apparently) unfortunate ramifications that abortion access has on an (apparently) desirable conundrum: teenage pregnancy.

“This study thus suggests that remote dispensing of abortion drugs by mail, common carrier, and interactive computer service is depressing expected birth rates for teenaged mothers in Plaintiff States, even if other overall birth rates may have been lower than otherwise was projected,” the suit read on page 190.

The Supreme Court unexpectedly saved mifepristone access in June, when it unanimously ruled that a group of different plaintiffs, represented by the right-wing Christian legal group Alliance Defending Freedom, did not have legal standing to sue the FDA and that the legal organization had failed to demonstrate how its clients were personally harmed by the drug’s existence on the market.

By and large, most Americans support abortion access. In a 2023 Gallup poll, just 12 percent of surveyed Americans said that abortion should be illegal in all circumstances. Meanwhile, 69 percent believe that it should be legal in the first trimester of pregnancy.

This article has been updated.

In an effort to shrink the size of the federal government, Donald Trump’s transition team is considering different plans to abolish a crucial financial regulatory agency—a move that could have far-reaching effects on the economy.

While interviewing potential nominees for positions heading up government financial agencies, Trump advisers have floated whether it would be worth dissolving some agencies, like the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation, or FDIC, according to The Wall Street Journal.

The team is considering moving the responsibilities of the FDIC, which include providing deposit insurance for banks, to the Treasury Department, some people familiar with the matter told the Journal.

Potential nominees have also been meeting with DOGE co-chairs technocrat troll Elon Musk and failed presidential candidate Vivek Ramaswamy, as well as hedge fund manager Scott Bessent, the major Trump donor tapped to lead the Treasury, according to sources.

The FDIC is key to financial stability and security because it insures funds in depositors’ checking and savings accounts. To threaten that insurance would almost certainly cause customers to fear that their money is no longer safe. It could potentially lead to a run on the banks, which might result in banks failing in a major financial collapse.

But if a cut makes the wiley DOGE czars feel like they’re reducing bureaucratic redundancies, it must be worth it, right?

Sheila Bair, who previously served as chair of the FDIC, warned about the plan to dissolve the essential regulator.

“Eliminating the FDIC is so out there, not sure it needs response,” Bair wrote in a post on X Friday. “FDIC has a perfect record of protecting insured deposits for over 90 years. Strong consumer confidence in the brand, providing stability during crises. During the [Great Financial Crisis], money was running INTO banks.”

Bair, who also served as the former assistant secretary for financial institutions, explained that the Treasury Department was not well suited to take on the responsibilities of the FDIC.

“As a former Treasury official, big supporter of the Department, but it would not be a good home for deposit insurance. Deposit insurance is funded by bank premiums, not taxpayers. Treasury has no expertise in handling bank failures. Changing the guarantor would create confusion among depositors who are comforted by the ‘FDIC Insured’ sign at their banks,” she added in a separate post.

Critics are torching a New York Times op-ed Friday by the chief of UnitedHealthcare’s parent company, arguing that the $23.5 million-salaried executive’s message overwhelmingly ignored the failures actively perpetuated by his company in the American health care system.

UnitedHealth Group CEO Andrew Witty condemned the American public’s gleeful response to the death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, who was assassinated by a masked gunman last week on the streets of New York City just hours before an investor meeting.

In roughly 600 words, he also attempted to deflect his insurance network’s responsibility in the growing inequity in America’s health care system, vaguely pointing to a “patchwork” of failures decades in the making while swearing that his corporate network—which reported $22 billion in profits in 2023 alone, nearly three times the figure reported by CVS, the second-most-profitable health insurance company that year—was consistently fighting to “deliver high-quality care and lower costs.”

But readers weren’t buying it.

Instead, they swarmed the Times with negative feedback, piling on more than 2,500 comments within hours of the article’s publication, temporarily disabling its Comments section. Users shared their own horrible experiences with the health insurance industry, deriding Witty’s vapid analysis as a “self-serving essay” that did nothing to address UnitedHealthcare’s role in a system that prioritizes shareholder profits over successful medical outcomes for its clients.

Federal data from 2022 compiled by the personal finance website ValuePenguin found that UnitedHealthcare far outpaced its competitors when it came to denying coverage, rejecting 32 percent or roughly one in three claims. In 2024, the insurer’s parent group spent more than $5.8 million lobbying Congress on health care–related issues.

Meanwhile, Americans are paying more than ever for health insurance, with costs far outpacing the rate of inflation. A Kaiser Family Foundation report published earlier this year found that the vast majority of U.S. adults are worried about being able to afford a major medical expense, regardless of their financial position.

Tulsi Gabbard is flopping in her meetings to persuade Senate Republicans to back her unpopular nomination as Donald Trump’s director of national intelligence, according to a report from The Hill published Friday.

“She was proving to be a little shallow, like a House member talking at a hearing and not someone who needs to provide the president’s daily intelligence briefing,” one source familiar with the meetings told The Hill.

It seems that in her exchanges, Gabbard had been all sound, no fury. One Senate Republican, who called Gabbard’s meetings “BS sessions,” said that several Republicans were left wanting more substantive responses.

“I’ve heard that she’s not very well prepared,” the Republican senator said. “I’ve heard not great things.”

A second Senate Republican said she’d elicited “a lot of eyerolls” from senators.

One Senate GOP aide, whose member had met with Gabbard, said her disastrous audiences with Senate Republicans “don’t make it easy” for her to gain the support she needs to be confirmed. “She’s got some work to do if she wants the job. The more she meets with serious people, the more they’ll see there’s a competency deficit.”

The aide noted to The Hill that Gabbard’s “just not educated” on the kind of work involved in the position but said she was “a capable person who could learn quickly.”

Gabbard is “probably more vulnerable than [Pete] Hegseth right now,” another source familiar with the meetings said.

Yet another Senate Republican noted that Gabbard’s issues stemmed from having to walk back her position opposing reauthorization of FISA, a foreign spying tool that she would have to defend as head of U.S. national intelligence.

Gabbard’s bid for the high-ranking role has faced significant criticism, not only because she lacks experience in the intelligence profession but also because of her penchant for defending some of the world’s most violent autocrats—but of course she and Trump have that in common.

Trump transition spokesperson Alexa Henning pushed back on the characterization that Gabbard has been struggling in her meetings on Capitol Hill.

“These cowardly anonymous sources are desperately trying to hold on to power, so they hide behind the media to spread these falsities that directly subvert the will of the American people. President Trump won with a mandate for change from the American people, and that’s one of the reasons he nominated Lt. Col. Gabbard for DNI,” Henning said in a statement.

On Monday, Daniel Penny was acquitted of manslaughter and negligent homicide. On Saturday, he is expected to join President-elect Donald Trump at the Army-Navy college football game as the invited guest of his soon-to-be vice president, JD Vance.

Last year, Penny choked Jordan Neely, a homeless and severely mentally ill fellow passenger, to death on a New York City subway train. As a result of both his actions—Penny claimed he was protecting his fellow passengers, although there is no clear evidence they were in immediate danger—and his subsequent arrest, the 26-year-old former Marine quickly became a folk hero on the American right.

In a post on X on Friday, Vance confirmed reports that Penny had accepted his invitation to join him and Trump. “I’m grateful he accepted my invitation,” Vance wrote, “and hope he’s able to have fun and appreciate how much his fellow citizens admire his courage.”

Trump will also reportedly be joined by his scandal-ridden defense secretary pick, Pete Hegseth, as well as Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, whom Trump is reportedly considering as a backup if Hegseth’s nomination falls through.

Like many on the American right, Vance and DeSantis have embraced Penny. “It was a scandal Penny was ever prosecuted in the first place,” Vance tweeted. DeSantis agreed, writing that “the acquittal of Daniel Penny is clearly the just and correct verdict. I must admit I was skeptical that a jury in New York City would reach a unanimous not guilty verdict, and the jury deserves credit for doing the right thing.”

Trump has been a regular presence at the annual Army-Navy game, which is also known as “The President’s Game” because it is often attended by the commander in chief. Penny’s presence as a guest of honor, meanwhile, upholds a Republican Party tradition of embracing vigilantes.

Kyle Rittenhouse, who in 2020 killed two protesters in Kenosha, Wisconsin, and who successfully insisted in court that he had been acting in self-defense, was feted by the party, receiving job offers from top GOP officials, as well as a standing ovation at a Turning Point USA conference. Mark and Patricia McCloskey, meanwhile, earned a 2020 Republican National Convention speaking spot for brandishing guns at peaceful Black Lives Matter protesters.

Penny currently faces a civil suit brought against him by Jordan Neely’s father, Andre Zachery.

One of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.’s top attorneys helping him craft America’s public health policy previously tried to push the government to scrap the polio vaccine.

Aaron Siri, a key legal adviser helping Kennedy select federal health officials for the Department of Health and Human Services, in 2022 filed a petition to force the Food and Drug Administration to end the approval and “pause distribution” of 13 vaccines, reported The New York Times. Those included vaccines that have effectively vanquished lethal illnesses from public life, including polio, tetanus, diphtheria, and hepatitis A.

Siri reportedly called for a randomized, double-blind clinical trial of the polio vaccine before allowing the FDA to re-approve it (the polio vaccine has already been subjected to 300 studies that took place before and after its approval in 1955). That would mean giving half of the children involved in the study the actual polio vaccine and providing the other half with a placebo, allowing half of the study participants to unknowingly be exposed to a deadly disease that causes organ failure and paralysis.

In private conversations, Kennedy has expressed that he’d like to see Siri serve as HHS’s general counsel, the agency’s top legal position, according to the Times.

Earlier this week, Trump announced that Kennedy would spend his time at the top of HHS researching an already thoroughly debunked conspiracy that ties vaccine usage to autism rates. (The researcher that sparked the myth with a fraudulent paper lost his medical license and eventually rescinded his opinion. Since then, dozens of studies have proven there’s no correlation between autism and the jab, including one study that surveyed more than 660,000 children over the course of 11 years.)

Kennedy—a virulent vaccine conspiracy theorist who doesn’t believe that AIDS is caused by HIV, insists that WiFi causes cancer, and has shared he had a brain-eating worm in his head—has promised to completely reshape America’s approach to public health.

Under Trump’s helm, Kennedy has sworn to remove fluoride from all public water systems—a 1945 public health decision that has reduced cavities and tooth decay in adults and children by as much as 25 percent, according to the American Dental Association.

During the “plandemic”, Kennedy likened 2020 vaccination efforts to the Nazi testing on “Gypsies and Jews,” referring to the jab as “a pharmaceutical-driven, biosecurity agenda that will enslave the entire human race and plunge us into a dystopian nightmare.” In the immediate wake of Trump’s November win, Kennedy swore that he had no intentions of taking vaccines away from the American public, claiming that he was on the side of vaccine “freedom.” But other Trump allies—even prior to Kennedy’s nomination to front the HHS—have envisioned a future where vaccines new and old are stripped from the market, threatening America’s public health in the process.

Kennedy’s vaccine conspiracies aren’t just easily refutable, anti-vaxx hogwash—they’ve caused legitimate, real-world harm. Preceding a deadly measles outbreak on the Pacific islands of Samoa in 2019, Kennedy’s anti-vax nonprofit Children’s Health Defense spread rampant misinformation about the efficacy of vaccines, sending the nation’s vaccination rate plummeting from the 60-70 percent range to just 31 percent, according to Mother Jones. That year, the country reported 5,707 cases of measles—an illness that was declared eliminated by the United States in 2000 thanks to advancements in modern medicine (read: vaccines)—as well as 83 measles-related deaths, the majority of which were children under the age of five.

Since their invention, vaccines have proven to be one of the greatest accomplishments of modern medicine. The medical shots are so effective at preventing illness that they have practically eradicated some of the worst diseases from our collective culture, from rabies to smallpox—a fact that has possibly fooled some into believing that the viruses and their complications aren’t a significant threat for the average, health-conscious individual.