OpinionReview & Outlook
Donald Trump Is . . . the Terminator
He wants back into the White House, and forget about the Constitution.
By The Editorial Board
Dec. 5, 2022 6:45 pm ET
Former President Donald Trump Photo: JONATHAN DRAKE/REUTERS
President Trump would like to issue a clarification. “The Fake News is actually trying to convince the American People that I said I wanted to ‘terminate’ the Constitution,” he wrote Monday on Truth Social. What he really said, Mr. Trump insisted, was only that the 2020 election “SHOULD GO TO THE RIGHTFUL WINNER OR, AT A MINIMUM, BE REDONE.”
Is that all? In reality, there’s little distinction: The Constitution contains no provision for mulligan presidential elections, so what Mr. Trump is talking about is impossible under the parchment written by the Founders. But if he doesn’t grasp why he’s being called the constitutional Terminator, he should reread what he wrote two days earlier. The stolen 2020 election, Mr. Trump said, “allows for the termination of all rules, regulations, and articles, even those found in the Constitution.”
For years, Mr. Trump’s Twitter feed was the gift that kept on giving—to Democrats. Now his Truth Social account is playing the same role, giving the media a way to turn unfavorable stories back to Mr. Trump’s outburst du jour. Last week Elon Musk divulged new information about Twitter’s 2020 censorship of the Hunter Biden laptop story in the New York Post. Republicans should be on offense this week. Instead they are facing hostile questions about Mr. Trump’s Terminator fantasy and whether they will support him in 2024.
House Republicans are eager next year to take on social-media companies, which have earned some hard questions about their speech policies. But Mr. Trump undermines the effort when he says it’s proof of “OPEN AND BLATANT FRAUD.” The fact is he lost in 2020. Last month Mr. Trump’s handpicked “stop the steal” candidates lost in Arizona, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire and beyond. This is a dead end for the GOP.
Truth in advertising, though. Mr. Trump is giving Republicans a taste of what they’re in for if they nominate him again in 2024. His presidential campaign is less than a month old. Already Mr. Trump has dined with anti-Semites and a white nationalist, while calling for himself to be reinstated as President, even if this requires the “termination” of whatever in the Constitution stands in the way. What he’ll really terminate is the
Appeared in the December 6, 2022, print edition as 'Donald Trump Is . . . the Terminator'.
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