The Friday Brief, August 29, 2025

The Forever Presidency

Inside

The Forever Presidency
RIP Freedom Caucus
Trump Is Dying. Vance Knows.
The Socialist States of Trumpmerica
The War on Greenland
Early Warning Signs for MAGA
Flag Burning Is Protected Speech

The Big Picture

The Forever Presidency

On MSNBC yesterday, I was asked if Donald Trump would try to hold on to the White House after 2028.

Duh.

I wrote up a little tick-tock of how it happens:

March 1, 2027: The Oath

Republican candidates are all asked by the White House to swear to support Donald Trump in the 2028 election. J.D. Vance is the first to do so.

November 5, 2028: Election Night

The ballroom at Mar-a-Lago is a gaudy cocoon of certainty. Red velvet drapes, gilded columns, and flat-screen TVs tuned only to Fox. At 10:45 p.m., Donald J. Trump waddles, older and sicker, to the stage, bathed in klieg lights. Only 65% of the vote is counted, but he knows exactly what he’s doing; Arizona, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania hang in the balance. But Trump doesn’t care about arithmetic.

“We won. Everyone knows it,” he bellows. “Any ballots they find after tonight are fake. Rigged. We’re not going to let the steal happen again.”

The words are a trigger. Outside in Phoenix and Atlanta, DHS and ICE agents in tactical gear are already assembling at counting centers. They’re joined by a shocking number of local cops and state troopers who have been hearing for weeks in the cop underground that the moment was here. Trump supporters likewise surround polling and counting centers. Their livestreams beam into millions of homes: grainy video of ballot boxes, muttered threats, the hum of diesel engines idling in parking lots. AI videos appear across social platforms, claiming massive Democratic voter fraud.

The media can’t keep up.

On social platforms, the declaration metastasizes. Memes show election workers loading boxes of “fake votes” into the back of trucks. The hashtag #StopTheSteal2028 surges to the top of X, Truth Social, and TikTok. In the space of minutes, Trump has conjured a parallel reality: the votes still in boxes are not votes at all, but evidence of a crime.

November 6–8, 2028: The Lawsuit Blitz

Dawn brings a blizzard of paperwork. Trump’s lawyers file suits in every battleground state, demanding counts be frozen. The filings are thin gruel, a rehash of 2020, with recycled affidavits, dubious “experts”, and AI-generated videos and evidence treated as gospel. But volume is the weapon. The goal isn’t to win outright, but to flood the zone until confusion becomes fact.

In Georgia, Republican legislators meet in emergency session under buzzing fluorescent lights. Their statement is blunt: they will not certify “tainted” results. In Arizona, the same theater plays out, lawmakers pounding desks while MAGA supporters howl approval from the gallery. Certification, once a clerical matter, is recast as a partisan choice.

On cable, the split-screen drama intensifies. CNN shows footage of ballots still being counted; Fox displays graphics declaring Trump the winner. In diners and bars across the South and Midwest, one version of reality takes root. The other becomes “fake news.”