Trump Has Reportedly Been Telling People He’s Going to Be President Again by August, Which Would Suggest He’s Planning a Coup (Or Has Fully Descended Into Madness)

Is Donald Trump ever going to be president again? In theory, should he set aside the fact that he actually hated being president, and decide to run again in 2024, and should tens of millions of Americans lose their minds and cast their votes for a wannabe dictator who is probably at this moment ranting to a garden hose about how he beat Joe Biden, he could make his way back to the White House in January 2025. Is he going to be president as early as this August? No! Obviously! Why? Well, there’s the minor matter of the fact that Biden‘s first term doesn’t expire for another 1,329 days, making it impossible for Trump to take over any time before then, unless he is planning a coup. Which it sounds like he might be, insomuch as one can plan a coup from the omelet station at Mar-a-Lago.

According to New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman, Trump has apparently been “telling a number of people he’s in contact with that he expects he will get reinstated [as president] by August.” Though we said it mere moments ago, it bears repeating that one is not simply “reinstated” as president of the United States as though their being booted from the White House was simply a mistake; again, the only way Trump could become president again by the end of the summer would be if he was scheming something that falls under the umbrella of treason. Sane people know this. Yet while Trump is assuredly not going to come within 1,000 feet of the Oval Office any time soon—or ever again!—some of his craziest supporters appear to worryingly believe he might.

Per Business Insider:

The anti-democratic conspiracy theory [that Trump will be “reinstated” as president] has been bubbling up in fringe conservative media for several months. It has no basis under the Constitution or any legitimate legal framework. MyPillow CEO Mike Lindell has been a prominent proponent of the theory. The former Trump attorney Sidney Powell also floated the idea at a QAnon conference over the weekend.

The anticipation of a Trump reinstatement on a certain date could spread further among the most dedicated Trump supporters. The calls to help overturn the 2020 election on January 6, for example, gained steam through a pro-Trump bus tour by a fringe group and led to the insurrection at the Capitol. Lindell has said August is when he would go to the Supreme Court to present evidence he’s acquired that would be so convincing that the justices would be forced to reject the 2020 election result. A podcast from the former Trump adviser Steve Bannon has amplified the conspiracy theory, as Lindell and others have gone on the show to promote it with minimal pushback. The podcast is influential among GOP lawmakers hoping to avoid a primary challenge while seeking reelection. Trump’s lawyers and other Republicans filed dozens of lawsuits related to the election; all failed.

Over the weekend, disgraced national security adviser Michael Flynn—who Ivanka Trump insisted on bringing onboard in the Trump administration and who her father pardoned in the waning days of his presidency—declared at a Dallas event on Sunday that a Myanmar-style coup “should happen here” in the United States. (He later claimed that his words had been “twisted.”) In December 2020, Flynn, along with Powell and others, met with Trump at the White House to reportedly discuss the former national security adviser’s idea to invoke martial law as part of the effort to stop Biden from becoming president. The meeting was said to have devolved “into screaming matches at certain points as some of Trump’s aides pushed back on Powell and Flynn’s more outrageous suggestions about overturning the election.”

While some people insist Trump is an unhinged has-been—which he is!—whose delusions should be ignored, others think treating “evidence of a possible seditious conspiracy as mere loose talk from an addled man” should be very closely paid attention to. In a long twitter thread on Tuesday, attorney and reporter Seth Abramson wrote, “There are efforts afoot now in GA, AZ, NV, and WI to delegitimize Biden’s victories there. Meanwhile, Trump advisers Flynn and Powell are saying that once those victories are delegitimized, the military should move in. If Trump is in on the conversations, it’s a coup attempt…. To be clear, I have *consistently* said that I do *not* believe the military would ever participate in a coup. The point of this thread isn’t to suggest a coup will happen, but that Donald Trump and his co-conspirators must be investigated for seditious conspiracy immediately.” He added: “We’ve been around this mountain with Trump before—and specifically on the question of conspiracy, aiding and abetting, and attempted crimes. You can be arrested for certain inchoate federal criminal offenses even if the crime you ultimately want to see committed doesn’t occur. We don’t have a federal criminal justice system that says a crime is only a crime after it’s successful. I suspect that even a child would be able to see why. If that were how the system worked, criminals would *succeed* before we could start trying to undo what they had done. Instead, we have state/federal criminal justice systems that try to cut off criminal conspiracies at the pass once law enforcement has evidence the conspirators have taken at least one discrete step toward achieving their illegal ambitions.”

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