Trump can't run again, acting attorney general says

Todd Blanche said the obvious thing out loud, and somehow that counts as news. The 22nd Amendment says a president elected twice can't be elected again. That's it. That's the whole legal question. It doesn't matter who's sitting in the Oval Office or how many people float the idea on cable news as a joke or a threat or a trial balloon. The text is short and it isn't ambiguous.

What's actually interesting here isn't the amendment, it's how much oxygen the "third term" chatter has sucked up for months. Allies floated it, Trump himself joked about it more than once, and plenty of people on the left treated every joke like a five-alarm constitutional crisis in the making. Now the man running the Justice Department has said flatly it's not happening, and that should settle it. If it doesn't, that tells you something about who actually wanted the controversy more than the outcome.

We'd also push back gently on our own side here. Testing the boundaries of institutions for sport, even rhetorically, isn't a great habit to get into. The Constitution isn't a suggestion box. Blanche giving a straight answer instead of hedging or lawyering it into mush is the kind of thing that should be unremarkable. That it feels notable says more about the current temperature of politics than it does about him.

None of this changes the 2028 field or who Republicans nominate next. It just closes off a distraction that never had legal legs to begin with. Good. Now can we talk about something that actually matters.