“We’re trying to do another four years,” President Donald Trump said at a Saturday night rally in Georgia. “Otherwise, I’ll see you in four years.”
Trump’s “increasingly overt flirtations with running again in 2024,” as the Associated Press put it, must be met with “a proportionate response,” wrote political scientists Alexander Kirshner and Claudio López-Guerra. The president’s transparent attempts to “subvert” the outcome of the 2020 election threaten the “viability of democracy in the United States,” they argued, and this impeachable offense should compel Congress to convict Trump, thus rendering him ineligible for a future presidency.
While political commentators are debating “the wisdom of pursuing criminal prosecutions of Trump” after Inauguration Day, the pair of scholars made the case in a Friday op-ed in The Guardian that “criminal prosecutions are not the only, or even the best mechanism for responding to the Trumpian challenge to self-government.” Continue reading.