After nearly a decade of Donald Trump dominating America’s frontal lobe, most of us have developed the survival skill of rolling our eyes and moving on. Ten years of Trump noise will do that to a body. We’ve watched reality TV bleed straight into the Oval Office until everyone’s half-sedated, doom-scrolling through each new absurdity like it’s just another weather update.

After all we live in a country where the MyPillow guy once wandered into the West Wing to pitch martial law. This level of lunacy would’ve crippled a lesser nation’s psyche, and yet here we are, still upright, if slightly slumped.

But every now and then, something still manages to cut through the static. Trump’s latest grin-and-wink routine about sticking around after January 20, 2029 made my blood pressure twitch. He recently told NBC he’s “not joking” about a third term and teased “methods” to pull it off, including a Bond-villainesque subplot in which Vice President J.D. Vance wins in 2028, then politely hands the keys back to his boss. Sure, it sounds like he’s trolling and maybe he is, but this is the same maniac who once “joked” about refusing to concede an election, and January 6th showed us all how funny that was.

We all know that Trump loves walls, but he keeps barreling into one he can’t bulldoze. The Twenty-Second Amendment isn’t a polite suggestion taped to the White House fridge. It’s pretty straight forward and ironclad: get elected twice and then “beat it.” And the Twelfth closes the side door, banning anyone ineligible for the presidency from moon-walking in as VP. Could those constitutional barriers be breached? Sure, I guess, right after two-thirds of Congress agrees, thirty-eight state legislatures nod in unison, and every writer in America finally agrees on the Oxford comma. Translation: somewhere between a cold day in hell and Vermin Supreme sweeping the Iowa caucuses with 100% of the delegates.

So why burn two hours of my otherwise pleasant Saturday afternoon writing about an idea that has the legal shelf life of gas station sushi? Because complacency kills. That was gospel when I was in the infantry, and it ought to be gospel in politics. Authoritarian regimes don’t usually kick things off with tanks and troops rolling down Main Street. They start by floating the unthinkable, watching to see who shrugs, then floating it again, just a bit louder.

We don’t need Doc Brown and a rattle-trap DeLorean to find examples. All we have to do is look at recent history, at stuff that’s happened since YouTube and Twitter started warping our attention spans. Erdoğan rebranded himself out of Turkey’s term limits, called snap elections until the clock reset, and declared it democracy. Vladimir Putin played the long game and stepped aside just long enough to install a puppet, change the rules, and slide right back into power. Each move came with plenty of legalese—referendums, court rulings, parliamentary votes—but the result was the same: democracy got gutted and left on display like a hunting trophy.

Trump is reading from that same dog-eared playbook. Or maybe someone is reading it to him (or handing him the CliffsNotes) because let’s be honest here, there’s a pretty good chance he’s never made it through an actual book, including the one he wrote. But we all know how much he admires strongmen, wants to see himself as one, and loves floating big red test balloons. That’s what he does. Float the unthinkable, waits for outrage fatigue, then either pretend it was all just a harmless joke or cranks the dial up another notch.

And it’s not just Trump testing the waters. When Steve Bannon whipped up a “We want Trump in ’28!” chant at CPAC this year, the crowd didn’t boo. They actually beamed, and clapped their hands like true believers at a rally in 1933. And that applause isn’t just more harmless noise. The Constitution is only as strong as the culture willing to defend it. As we’ve seen, Constitutional guardrails are easy to damage, but not so easy to repair.

And if you look around, you might notice that some of the guardrails are already pretty dented. We’ve watched presidents profit off the presidency, Supreme Court spouses scheme behind the scenes, senators hold national security hostage over their partisan culture wars. If you toss a casual threat to the Twenty-Second on the pile and half the country shrugs, there is real danger. Optional outrage could pretty easily become optional democracy.

Cue the what-about chorus. “Relax! The courts will save us.” Maybe, but smoke alarms don’t drag you out of a burning house, they just scream until someone actually does something. And anyway, Trump’s already been busy gutting the system. Defying Supreme Court rulings when they don’t serve him and stacking lower courts with his loyalists. Institutions aren’t self-cleaning. They can only survive if people step up when it counts.

Yes, Trump may be part trolling, part ego-tripping, but history tends to punish countries that dismiss early warnings as theater. The founders drew the line in ink. Keeping that ink bright is on us. If we meet this nonsense with nervous laughter and cable-news eye-rolls, and the Overton window slides open wider. Meet it with a collective, non-negotiable “Nope,” and that window slams shut… this time and every time it cracks.

So, fine, I just spent eight hundred or so words to deliver what should fit in a fortune cookie: Two terms, pack your bags, don’t let the door hit you. Sad that we have to spell it out… but here we are. Our republic doesn’t need a king. It needs its citizens who understand why the crown got melted down in the first place.

Nick Allison is a former Army infantryman, a college dropout, and a writer based in Austin, Texas. He spends too much time reading about history, democracy, authoritarianism, and systems in collapse—and not enough time being optimistic about any of it. He’s not a journalist or a pundit—just a political independent, unaffiliated with any party, who still believes the Constitution is worth defending. Ever since discovering the Mac shortcut for the em dash way too late in life, he’s been abusing it—constantly—and has no plans to stop.

Also, he secretly enjoys writing his own bio in the third person because it probably makes him feel a little smarter and more important than he actually is.

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