Trump Lawyer Seriously Explored Options for Third Term

Donald Trump has been looking at how to be president for a third term since at least October 2023.

The Wall Street Journal reports that Boris Ephsteyn, who worked in the White House in Trump’s first term and is now one of his personal attorneys, made the unfounded claim back then, during a meeting with an associate, that based on the law, he believed that Trump could run again in 2028.

Trump has asserted in recent weeks that he is “not joking” about staying in office past January 2029, when his second and final term is up, claiming that there are certain plans that would enable him to do so. Other White House officials are claiming it’s a nonissue, such as Karoline Leavitt last week, but only days later Trump contradicted her.

Others in the Trump orbit, such as Steve Bannon, think there’s merit in the idea, and some senior Republicans told the Journal that they believe him. Unnamed sources told the Journal that they see the lack of resistance from law firms, corporations, universities, and Congress as showing that he has the potential to bulldoze resistance to staying in office.

The Constitution bars presidents from being elected to more than two terms. Republican Representative Andy Ogles has introduced legislation to amend the Constitution to allow presidents to serve a third term if one is nonconsecutive. It would be a tall order, as a constitutional amendment requires a two-thirds vote from both the House and Senate, and ratification by three-fourths of the states. But Trump, unfortunately, has often found a way to get around checks to his power.

Elon Musk is on X trying to convince everyone that it was voter ID—and not the state Supreme Court race that he spent millions on—that mattered most, after conservative Judge Brad Schimel lost in Wisconsin to liberal Judge Susan Crawford on Monday night. 

“This was the most important thing,” the world’s richest man posted over the passing of Wisconsin’s voter ID amendment. This new spin goes against pretty much everything he’s said about the importance of the Supreme Court race since he started dumping time and money into it. 

“A Supreme Court election in Wisconsin might determine the fate of America,” Musk posted on X last Saturday. 

“This Wisconsin Supreme Court race might decide the future of America and Western Civilization!” he wrote on Sunday. “It’s a big deal.”

“Vote for Superjudge Brad Schimel in Wisconsin on Tuesday!! “ he posted, along with a very poorly animated image of Schimel. “The Republican House majority is razor thin and the Democrats want to redraw Wisconsin districts to flip the House and stop the government reforms. Super important to vote for Superjudge!!”

Musk even took his cheerleading offline. 

“The reason tonight’s elections are so important is that the judge race will decide whether the Wisconsin districts get redrawn, they’re gonna try to gerrymander Wisconsin to remove two Republican seats,” Musk said on Fox News Tuesday evening. “The House is currently Republican by a razor-thin margin, which means that losing this judge race has a good chance of causing Republicans to lose control of the House. If you lose control of the House, there will be nonstop impeachment hearings, there will be nonstop hearings and subpoenas … everything possible to stop the agenda that the American people voted for when they voted for President Trump.”  

A lot can change in a night. Now Musk is insisting that he “expected” to lose. “There is value to losing a piece for a positional gain,” he wrote on X at the crack of dawn on Wednesday. 

Musk was relentless in his support of Schimel. He appeared at a large rally wearing a cheesehead, paid canvassers $20 an hour to carry out an all-out door-to-door assault on Wisconsin voters, and handed out two $1 million checks, lottery-style, to people who signed his petition hating on liberal “activist” judges. He spent $25 million in total just to lose the race and pivot to saying that a secondary ballot initiative was actually the real prize. And for what it’s worth, Wisconsin has required voter ID for nearly a decade, it just isn’t a state constitutional amendment. That victory is marginal, at best. Schimel’s loss was a massive rejection of Musk and his infinite war chest.

Elon Musk came up short Tuesday when trying to buy a seat on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court—and he has no one to blame but himself.

In the state election, Judge Susan Crawford secured a whopping 55 percent of the vote, while the Musk-backed Judge Brad Schimel captured only 45 percent. While the position is nonpartisan, this election still determined the court’s ideological lean. Crawford was backed by Democrats, while Schimel was backed by Republicans.

Musk, and the groups linked to him, poured out more than $20 million to back Schimel, including $4.3 million into canvassing efforts. Musk had personally appeared in Wisconsin ahead of the election, donning a cheese hat and ranting about the end of Western civilization. He offered cash rewards of $100 for filling out his petition against activist judges, $20 for canvassing, and $1 million in a sweepstakes (which was won by spokespeople). Still, the billionaire bureaucrat was unable to close the gaping 10-point margin, and now, some are speculating that it was Musk’s attempt to interfere with the election that secured Crawford’s win.

Politico’s senior political columnist Jonathan Martin wrote in the DC Playbook Wednesday morning that Musk had actually made things far worse for the conservative candidate.

“The margin in the Wisconsin court contest indicates that by inserting himself into the race so personally, Musk undermined the GOP-aligned candidate. Democrats’ internal polling had Crawford leading, but not by the 10-point margin she will win once all of Milwaukee has been counted,” Martin wrote.

“Insisting on showing up to campaign in the final weekend of the campaign was self-defeating enough. But it’s hard to think of another state, besides neighboring Minnesota, that would be less receptive to handing out money for votes. These are high-turnout, healthy civic culture states. Musk may not have known that—but why didn’t any Republicans who did steer him away from the cash gambit?” he added.

More than $98 million was spent on Wisconsin’s Supreme Court race, making it the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history. More than $67 million went to advertisements, according to AdImpact. Democratic advertisers spent $36 million, and Republican advertisers spent more than $31 million.

It seems that Musk’s ploy to pay for votes with cash didn’t resonate with Wisconsin residents. In fact, The New York Times’ swing map saw a major statewide shift to the left compared to the 2024 presidential election.

“Today Wisconsinites fended off an unprecedented attack on our democracy, our fair elections, and our Supreme Court. And Wisconsin stood up and said loudly that justice does not have a price, our courts are not for sale,” Crawford declared in her victory speech Tuesday night.

While Musk was able to buy Donald Trump the presidency, it seems that he’s lost his touch. Musk’s messy work with the Department of Government Efficiency has tanked public opinion, while protesters across the country target their ire at the billionaire bureaucrat and his beloved Tesla dealerships. While his net worth plummets, Musk has taken to complaining about how hard he has it. Voters do not appear to be responding well.

“Please send @elonmusk to all the close races!” wrote Jon Favreau, former speechwriter and podcaster, in a post on X.

Donald Trump just made the rationale for his tariff “Liberation Day” crystal clear: revenge.

In a post on Truth Social late Tuesday, the president said that the tariffs were his administration’s “fight” against Democrats’ “wild and flagrant push to not penalize Canada for the sale, into our Country, of large amounts of Fentanyl, by Tariffing the value of this horrible and deadly drug in order to make it more costly to distribute and buy.”

Approximately 0.2 percent of American fentanyl seizures occur at the Canadian border, according to federal statistics.

But Trump’s aggressive rhetoric and high levies on Canada have practically shattered the two neighbors’ long-standing allyship. On Thursday, Canadian Prime Minister Mark Carney announced that his country’s cozy relationship with the U.S. had come to an end, and that Canada would wean itself off American products and services “at speeds we haven’t seen in generations.”

Trump singled out four Republican senators in particular who have pushed back against his tariffs. “They are playing with the lives of the American people, and right into the hands of the Radical Left Democrats and Drug Cartels,” he said, referring to Mitch McConnell, Susan Collins, Lisa Murkowski, and Rand Paul.

“The Senate Bill is just a ploy of the Dems to show and expose the weakness of certain Republicans, namely these four, in that it is not going anywhere because the House will never approve it and I, as your President, will never sign it,” Trump said. “Why are they allowing Fentanyl to pour into our Country unchecked, and without penalty. What is wrong with them, other than suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome, commonly known as TDS?”

Trump and his allies have frequently accused anyone that critiques their work of being mentally ill, effectively undermining the legitimacy of critical thought in the groupthink of his already sycophantic base.

“Who can want this to happen to our beautiful families, and why? To the people of the Great States of Kentucky, Alaska, and Maine, please contact these Senators and get them to FINALLY adhere to Republican Values and Ideals,” Trump said. “They have been extremely difficult to deal with and unbelievably disloyal to hardworking Majority Leader John Thune, and the Republican Party itself. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”

Liberal Dane County Judge Susan Crawford was elected to the Wisconsin Supreme Court Tuesday, crushing Elon Musk’s attempt to buy yet another election.

Decision Desk HQ called the race after just 36 percent of the vote had been counted. Crawford held a decisive lead over conservative Waukesha County Judge Brad Schimel with 57.9 percent of the vote to his 42.1 percent.

Crawford’s win will ensure that the liberal majority on the court remains, as it tees up to weigh important questions about abortion, union power, election rules, and congressional maps.

Schimel has received more than $20 million from groups associated with Musk, including the more than $4.3 million Musk’s America PAC poured into the Schimel campaign’s canvassing efforts over the last eight weeks. Musk circulated a petition offering Wisconsin residents $100 to sign a statement condemning “activist judges” and giving them the chance to enter a $1 million sweepstakes.

At an America PAC event Sunday night in Green Bay, Musk gave away $1 million to a preselected spokesperson for the petition. Again, he offered people money to sign up to go door-to-door for him. “It’s … thumbs up and hold a picture of Judge Schimel. And that’s it, and you get $20,” Musk said, instructing them to take pictures as proof of their canvassing efforts.

As of Tuesday, more than $98 million had been spent in Wisconsin’s 2025 Supreme Court race, making it the most expensive judicial race in U.S. history, according to Axios.

The results of this election will affect several hot-button issues in the state, with potentially national repercussions. The court is expected to weigh a question about whether abortion is protected by the Wisconsin state Constitution, which could potentially upend a preceding decision about a 1849 law banning abortion with no exceptions for rape and incest. While Crawford made supporting abortion access a cornerstone of her campaign, Schimel has supported leaving the ban in place and asserted that there is no constitutional right to abortion.

Musk has expressed particular interest in the court’s July decision to legalize the use of absentee ballot drop boxes in elections. “Very important to vote Republican for the Wisconsin Supreme Court to prevent voting fraud!” Musk wrote on X in January. though there is no proven connection between the use of drop boxes and widespread voter fraud. The court’s decisions on election rules could have a significant impact on the midterm elections in 2026, and the 2028 presidential election.

The candidates also emphasized their role in approving proposed congressional maps. This is a crucial issue in Wisconsin, where Republicans have amassed six out of the state’s eight U.S. House seats, despite holding thin margins in state-wide races.

A liberal majority on the court could not only keep additional seats out of the hands of Republicans but also ensure that any legislative redistricting pitched by Democrats is readily approved.

In a stroke of revenge for Donald Trump and Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr., thousands of employees of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention lost their jobs Tuesday.

The “reduction in force” affected workers across many departments vital to U.S. public health, including the National Center for Injury Prevention and Control, the Division of Population Health, the Division of Reproductive Health, the Division of HIV Prevention, the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health, and the Division of Environmental Health Science and Practice, Wired reports.

Even programs at the centers on Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion as well as HIV, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and Tuberculosis Prevention were affected. The HIV program reportedly lost at least half of its workforce. Employees across the agency received notices via email beginning 5 a.m. Tuesday, with some workers showing up to their offices to find their ID badges didn’t work anymore.

“I regret to inform you that you are being affected by a reduction in force (RIF) action,” the email notice stated, according to Wired. “This RIF does not reflect directly on your service, performance, or conduct. It is being taken solely for the reasons stated in the memorandum. After you receive this notice you will be placed on administrative leave and will no longer have building access beginning Tuesday, April 1, unless directed otherwise by your leadership.”

One CDC employee told the magazine, “There has been no effort in allowing staff to transfer projects, programs, or responsibilities.” Even the Freedom of Information Act office at the CDC, as well as the FDA’s communications and web office, were cut.

The move comes among massive layoffs from Kennedy across the entire Department of Health and Human Services on Tuesday. Those firings include people at the National Institutes of Health, the Food and Drug Administration, and the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services.

Kennedy has long been an anti-vaccine activist, so the move is in line with his beliefs, especially since he has already revoked over $11 billion in Covid-19 aid funding from HHS. Trump has long held a grudge against the CDC and other public health agencies, blaming them for tanking his first term when it was really his own mishandling of the Covid-19 pandemic. Now he and Kennedy are dealing a crippling blow to public health in America.

Nine House Republicans defected from their party on the parental proxy vote Tuesday in a direct rejection of Speaker Mike Johnson’s plans.

The vote was for a bill regarding whether to allow new parents in the House to have a proxy vote for them in the first 12 weeks after the birth of their child. The legislation, which would have helped new mothers and fathers, was put forth by MAGA Republican Anna Paulina Luna and Democrats Brittany Pettersen and Sara Jacobs. Luna and Pettersen each gave birth recently, and there is no parental leave for members of Congress.

When Johnson and other House Republican leaders went out of their way to block the bill, nine House Republicans—Luna, Kevin Kiley, Tim Burchett, Jeff Van Drew, Greg Steube, Mike Lawler, Ryan Mackenzie, Nick LaLota, and Max Miller—all turned on Johnson, torpedoing his plans and passing the parental proxy bill.

The nine betrayals bothered Johnson so much that he canceled votes in the House for the rest of the week.

Johnson, who doesn’t have the greatest working relationship with Luna, insisted that the parental proxy bill would lead to more representatives voting remotely.

“I believe it’s unconstitutional. I believe it violates more than two centuries of tradition in the institution, and I think that it opens a Pandora’s box where, ultimately, maybe no one is here, and we’re all voting remotely by AI or something. I don’t know,” Johnson said at a press conference last week. “I don’t think that’s what Congress is supposed to be. This is a deliberative body. You cannot deliberate with your colleagues if you’re out somewhere else.”

Republicans are weirdly obsessed with killing this bill, whether it be for anti–work from home reasons, anti-woman reasons, or both.

Pettersen, who is the thirteenth active House member to give birth, spoke in support of Luna’s bill on the House floor while holding her 9-week-old son, Sam, in her arms. Sam was born prematurely.

“No mom or dad should be in the position that I was in and so many parents have found themselves in. It is anti-woman, it’s anti-family, and we need to come together,” she said. “We have a long ways to go to make this place accessible for young families like mine.… For all of the parents here, we know that when we have newborns, it’s when they’re the most vulnerable in their life. It’s when they need 24-7 care.”

The Trump administration on Tuesday froze $35 million in family planning, sexual, and reproductive health funding.

The “Abortion, Every Day” newsletter reports that the move, which targets funding under Title X, will hit multiple nonprofit organizations, including conservatives’ bogeyman Planned Parenthood. Several states will be impacted, with Maine, Missouri, Mississippi, Montana, Tennessee, and Utah having their Title X funds reduced to zero.  

Other states, such as Pennsylvania, Minnesota, and Alaska will lose the majority of their funding, while Connecticut, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, New Hampshire, Ohio, South Carolina, Texas, and Virginia will lose part of their funding. 

Title X provides funds, mostly to uninsured and low-income Americans, for cancer screenings, birth control, and testing for sexually transmitted infections, as the country’s only federal family planning program. Sixty percent of women benefit from publicly funded clinics as their usual source of health care, while for 40 percent, these clinics are their only health care option. 

The move comes after the White House froze $120 million in Title X program grants last week, half of the entire program, to make sure that recipients were complying with executive orders against diversity, equity, and inclusion. Conservatives have also wanted to defund Planned Parenthood and other organizations that advocate for abortion rights for a long time, despite federal law already prohibiting taxpayer funds being used for the procedure.

Now it seems that the right is going even further in targeting family planning and reproductive health altogether. Millions of people will lose access to pregnancy testing, contraception, STI treatment, infertility evaluation and counseling, and numerous other health services. But, as was said in the first Trump administration, the cruelty is the point.

The White House’s lines of communication appear to be frayed or, at the very least, out of date.

Just last month, Donald Trump practically threatened executives of America’s auto industry over a phone call, insisting that the tariffs would be “great,” that their companies would benefit from his plan to resurrect stateside manufacturing, and that, ultimately, the White House would not look favorably if they chose to raise prices on their product, reported The Wall Street Journal.

But White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt insisted Tuesday that she was unaware whether the president had urged America’s largest automakers not to raise prices due to his tariffs.

While answering a question highlighting that Trump has previously and repeatedly promised that other countries would “eat the cost” of his tariffs, Leavitt said she wasn’t sure if the comment “was made or was not made.”

“A tariff will be a tax on these foreign nations, these foreign companies, and if they want to be absolved of that tariff then they can come here to the United States of America to do business, bring their jobs here,” Leavitt reiterated.

But former White House officials—and some of the world’s top economists—argue that Trump’s tariffs will only spell disaster for the average American.

“So he’s doing this thinking that it’s going to restore manufacturing, but it’s actually going to have the opposite effect, and market participants know this,” former White House communications director Anthony Scaramucci told MSNBC last month, pointing to the redirection of capital into European markets since Trump announced the tariffs.

At the time, Scaramucci warned that Trump’s tariffs were scaring CEOs across multiple industries, who he had heard were blowing up the president’s phone in an effort to reverse the clock on the president’s trade war.

Trump’s global tariff war is expected to affect just about every sector of life for the average American.

Products that will see prices rise include groceries such as avocados, maple syrup, ground beef, cherry tomatoes, sugar, bananas, nuts, cooking oil, squash, cucumbers, strawberries, and pineapples. Trump’s tariff-related executive orders have also had immediate ramifications for countless other business sectors, raising the price on everything from liquor to gas.

Children’s toys, shoes, beer and alcohol, and crude oil were all hit in Trump’s 25 percent tariff hike on Canada and Mexico, alongside an additional 10 percent tariff on China. Car manufacturers BMW, Audi, Nissan, and Mazda were also affected, as was American-owned Ford. And every industry that relies on lumber, aluminum, and steel—from artisan goods to construction—will see markups as the materials themselves become more costly.

The rising cost of screws, for instance, has already started to affect supply chains for American companies that make everything from “car parts to appliances and football helmets to lawn mowers,” reported The Wall Street Journal.

Trump has leaned into tariffs as a key component of affording an extension to his 2017 tax plan, which overwhelmingly benefits corporations and is projected to add as much as $15 trillion to the national deficit. But experts believe that a trade war would be to the overwhelming detriment of American consumers and allies abroad—and that the self-inflicted pain could only serve to benefit U.S. adversaries around the globe.

Surprise, surprise: Russia has not turned out to be a reliable negotiating partner in ending the war in Ukraine.

Peace talks between the United States and the world power have seemingly stalled, Reuters reported Tuesday.

The interrupted discussion suggests that the White House and the Kremlin have been unable to broker a new deal since Russian President Vladimir Putin objected to America’s last proposal some two weeks ago.

Moscow “cannot accept” the current proposal to end the war because it fails to address problems that the Kremlin believes to have caused the conflict, Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said in an interview published Tuesday with a Russian state-sponsored magazine, International Affairs.

“We take the models and solutions proposed by the Americans very seriously, but we can’t accept it all in its current form,” Ryabkov said. “As far as we can see, there is no place in them today for our main demand, namely to solve the problems related to the root causes of this conflict. It is completely absent, and that must be overcome.”

Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov indicated on Tuesday that a breakthrough in talks between the nations “isn’t imminent,” according to PBS.

“The issues that we are discussing in connection with the Ukrainian settlement are quite complex, and they require a lot of additional efforts,” Peskov said during a conference call.

The White House appears to be growing increasingly frustrated with the situation. In a weekend spat more akin to a high school fight than a diplomatic negotiation, Donald Trump told NBC News’s Kristen Welker that he was “pissed off” with Putin over insults the Russian dictator had tossed at Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskiy.

The ordeal inspired Trump to pitch secondary tariffs between 25 and 50 percent on buyers of Russian oil, blaming the nation’s continued efforts to evade an end to the war.

“If Russia and I are unable to make a deal on stopping the bloodshed in Ukraine, and if I think it was Russia’s fault—which it might not be—but if I think it was Russia’s fault, I am going to put secondary tariffs on oil, on all oil coming out of Russia,” Trump said on Sunday.

Trump’s threat followed a call by Putin on Friday in which the Russian ruler demanded a transitional government to be put in place in Ukraine—a threat to Zelenskiy’s leadership, reported Agence France-Presse.

Zelenskiy lambasted Moscow in an address late Sunday, arguing that the Kremlin “blatantly makes a mockery of our partners’ efforts to advance a peace agenda.”

The conflict began when Russian forces crossed the Ukrainian border on February 24, 2022, which Putin tried to justify by falsely claiming that he needed to protect civilians in eastern Ukraine. The U.S. and Russia opened peace discussions at a meeting in Saudi Arabia in February, seeking a conclusion to the three-year war, but from the jump, the assembly conspicuously excluded Ukrainian leadership.

Russia has made a series of demands in order to end the war—which Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth blunderingly signed off on and then gently walked back at a February NATO conference in Munich. At the time, Hegseth said that the administration’s peace talks with Russia had taken several chips “off the table,” including Ukraine’s possible NATO membership (something the military alliance had promised in 2008), the possibility of a U.S. presence in Ukraine to enforce postwar security guarantees, and the end of NATO missions to Ukraine.

Since then, Putin has also insisted on taking complete control of the four Ukrainian regions Russia partially occupies as a result of the war, and that the Ukrainian army be limited going forward.*

European leaders have been watching the negotiations closely. On Tuesday, German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock described the deal as a “deadlock” and urged the U.S. not to capitulate to Putin’s “stalling tactics.”

* This article has been updated to clarify how much territory Russia controls.