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‘Really Chilling’: Trump Judicial Nominees Refuse to Say He's Not Eligible for 3rd Term
"The language of the constitutional amendment... makes it clear that no, he is not eligible for a third term," Sen. Chris Coons informed one Trump judicial nominee.
May 05, 2026
Political observers are expressing alarm after several of President Donald Trump's lifetime judicial nominees refused to say whether he is eligible to run for a third term.
During a Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on Thursday, Sen. Chris Coons (D-Del.) asked Trump judicial nominee John Marck to describe the 22nd Amendment of the US Constitution, which states that "no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice."
"The 22nd Amendment... senator, my career has mostly been in criminal prosecution, I haven't had an opportunity to use that one, specifically," Marck replied.
JUST IN: A Trump judicial nominee was asked point blank: is Trump eligible to run for a third term?
Their answer: “I would have to review the actual wording…”
Sen. Chris Coons then asked every nominee in the room to confirm the Constitution bars a third term.
Silence.
Every… pic.twitter.com/LzUZxFzaOL
— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) May 4, 2026
"Anyone able to help on the 22nd Amendment?" Coons asked the other judicial nominees at the hearing, one of whom explained that it was the amendment that sets a two-term limit for the presidency.
"Correct," Coons replied. "It states that no person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice. Mr. Marck, is President Trump eligible to run again for president in 2028?"
"Senator, without considering all the facts and looking at everything, depending on what the situation is, this, to me, strikes as something more of a hypothetical..."
"It's not a hypothetical," Coons interjected. "Has President Trump been elected president twice?"
"President Trump has been certified as president of the United States two times," Marck acknowledged.
"Is he eligible to run for a third term under our Constitution?" Coons asked.
"Uhm, I would have to review the..." Marck began before Coons again interjected.
"All I need to tell you is the language of the constitutional amendment that makes it clear that no, he is not eligible for a third term," the senator said.
Coons then challenged other Trump judicial nominees at the hearing—Southern District of Florida nominee Jeffrey Kuntz, Southern District of Texas nominee Arthur Roberts Jones, and Northern District of Ohio nominee Michael Hendershot—to say if they believed the Constitution barred Trump from running for a third term, and none of them did.
After watching video of Coons' exchange with Trump judicial nominees, investigative journalist and author Nick Bryant declared the whole episode to be "really chilling."
"Like a scene from a dystopian movie, and alarming for anyone who cares about democracy," Bryant wrote in a Monday social media post. "A judicial nominee flagrantly flouting the Constitution about Trump's eligibility for a third term. The Constitution is unambiguous. He is not eligible."
Former Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson noted that the Trump nominees were "not even pretending to honor the Constitution" during the hearing, while former Rep. Adam Kinzinger (R-Ill.) simply declared the entire exchange "unreal."
While the chances of Trump being allowed to stand for an unconstitutional third term at the moment are very low, the president has repeatedly teased plans to run for president again in 2028, telling an audience on Monday that he would be leaving the White House "eight or nine years from now."
Joyce Vance, a former federal prosecutor and current professor at the University of Alabama School of Law, said that Trump's declared intention to run for a third term should not be brushed off as mere trolling.
"This is how he started with the whole 'if I lose the election is fraudulent' shtick," she wrote. "If we don’t listen to this, shame on us. That man isn’t building a ballroom for the next guy."
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Why the Working Class Has Given Up on the Liberal Establishment
Billionaires are in control of both parties and working people across this country are not dumb. They are ready for populist change. How do we know this? They told us.
May 05, 2026
You’ve spent 25 years working for a company. You’re proud of your work. Your wages and benefits are good, and you’ve put together a decent life. Then your CEO says the company is heading for some tough times, and that everyone from the executive suite to the shop floor will need to make some sacrifices. You are willing to join with others to help the company survive. You feel part of it. It’s your identity. You will sacrifice if that’s what you and your company need to survive.
But when the sacrifice comes, the price paid is far from equal. You, along with hundreds of other workers, are laid off and are replaced with low-wage sub-contractors.
How would you feel?
I found out when a similar scenario was foisted on 114 food service and maintenance workers at Oberlin College in 2020. Many of them had been there longer than any of the administrators and most of the faculty. Their work for the college was their life, their identity. They cared for the students. They were proud to be associated with this elite liberal institution, wokeness and all. It was by far the best employer in northeastern Ohio, which has had its industrial base decimated over the last four decades.
In 2018, Oberlin’s administration had come up with a PR program called “One Oberlin” to secure the school’s finances, upgrade facilities, and prepare for the college’s third century. At the outset of the Covid-19 pandemic the Oberlin community was asked to pull together to make ends meet. But while the financial stress was real, it turned out “One Oberlin” was not: It failed to include the college’s unionized blue-collar workers. They were summarily dismissed, dispatched with a little severance and little else. They were devastated.
We know how they felt because a group of Oberlin student interns interviewed many of the laid off workers. These workers were hurt and they were angry. They saw this very liberal institution as hypocritical, as betraying its values, and as uncaring and cruel.
As an Oberlin alumnus, this was a wake-up call. Although a group of us did all we could to call out the college’s hypocrisy and compel it to save these jobs, we couldn’t get them to consider the workers as part of “One Oberlin.” (We were able to raise about $180,000 from alumni for these workers to cushion the blow.)
That led me to conduct a larger study of the impact of mass layoffs on politics. It didn’t take much of a leap to see that Oberlin’s liberal establishment was very similar to that of the Democratic Party. A declared ethos of caring and positive social values seemed always to stop when budgetary restraints forced a choice between the interests of workers and those of the party’s elites and their wealthy allies.
That turned out to be the case throughout the Midwest, where the Democratic Party’s fortunes have flagged over the past few decades as their “Blue Wall” crumbled. We used demographic and mass layoff data in conjunction with election results and found a statistically solid causal relationship: As the county mass layoff rate went up, the Democratic vote went down between 1996 and 2020. Year by year, voters in areas hard hit by mass layoffs were abandoning the Democratic Party.
Sherrod Brown, the former senator from Ohio who is trying to reclaim his job this year, found that the Democrats are still being blamed for the job destruction caused by NAFTA. After his loss in the 2024 campaign, he said:
The national Democratic brand has suffered, again, starting with NAFTA. My first term in the House [was] when NAFTA was voted on. I led the freshman class of 160 Democrats, and 40 Republicans, give or take, in opposition to NAFTA. I was in all the strategy meetings, all the vote counts. So, more Democrats voted against NAFTA than for it. More Republicans voted for it than against it. But it was seen [as a mark against Democrats], because we had a Democratic president, even though it was negotiated by a Republican, but that’s all background noise now. But what really mattered is: I still heard in the Mahoning Valley, in the Miami Valley, I still heard during the campaign, about NAFTA.
I’ve seen that erosion of American jobs and I’ve seen the middle class shrink. People have to blame someone. And it’s been Democrats. We are more to blame for it because we have historically been the party of [workers]. They expect Republicans to sell out to their corporate friends and to support the rich. But we don’t expect that from my party…
Our YouGov survey of 3,000 voters in Michigan, Ohio, Pennsylvania, and Wisconsin found that 70 percent of the respondents have negative opinions of the Democrats. That’s what happens when the Democrats, like Oberlin, bastions of liberal good will, become so cavalier about job destruction.
Can the Democrats Recover?
Everyone who wants to stop MAGA this coming fall, as well as in 2028, sure hopes so. But in the 130 congressional districts where the Democrats lose by 25 percent or more, the odds are slim. In those districts, the Democratic Party’s presence is so diminished it might as well not even exist. And it’s in those districts we need something new, starting with working-class candidates like Dan Osborn, who is running as an independent in Nebraska for the US Senate.
Are voters in red areas ready for working-class independents? Our YouGov survey shows they are. Looking only at rural county data in those four states (the reddest areas), there is strong support for a new party, independent of the two parties, that would run on a progressive populist working-class platform:
Voter Support for the New Independent Workers’ Political Association
- Rural Republicans: 50%
- Rural Independents: 50%
- Rural Democrats” 77%
(For more data and analysis please see my new book, The Billionaires Have Two Parties, We Need a Party of Our Own.)
A Policy Hail Mary?
If the Democrats want to reconnect with working people, they need to put job security front and center. They need to stop relying on public-private partnerships, which use public funds to encourage corporate job creation that too often fails to materialize. And the Dems need to purge vacuous language, like the phrase “the opportunity society,” which promotes corporate-first thinking that adds to, rather than reduces, job precarity. In fact, they should replace their corporate-first thinking, with people-first thinking.
To do so the Democrats should call for federal job guarantees. They would do well to read Jared Abbot’s review of a compendium of poll data that shows massive support for the government serving as the employer of last resort. People don’t want handouts; they want a chance to earn a fair living. (Even the new “Working Families Guarantee” agenda, put forward by the Working Families Party, guarantees just about everything but stops short of a federal job guarantee.)
But a shift to ensuring people-first job security will not come easily to a party dominated by wealthy donors, millionaire politicians, lobbyists, pollsters, and consultants. Corporate leaders will rail against the prospect of workers having access to federal jobs and thereby forcing the company to bid up wages and benefits to retain and attract employees. Heaven forbid that direct government support go to workers instead of corporations!
Until the party supports job guarantees and runs hundreds of working-class candidates, we can expect more working people to reject the Democratic establishment (and the liberal college administrators) who care so little about working-class job security.
That leaves us with a dangerous political vacuum that is pulling the working class both away from politics and towards demagogues who claim they will trash a system that has neglected so many for so long. But most working people know that genuine positive change is better than destructive change and they would welcome a new working-class party, especially in red areas. They have told us so.
They know that billionaires are in control of both parties, and that they really do need a party of their own.
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House Democrats Urge US State Dept to End Silence About Israel’s Nuclear Weapons
"Washington’s silence on the program is indefensible amid the war in Iran and the acute threat of military escalation, they argue. And they are right," said one arms control expert.
May 05, 2026
More than two dozen Democratic lawmakers in the US House of Representatives are urging the Trump administration to break its official silence on Israel's nuclear weapons program, whose existence is almost universally acknowledged even as its origins and status remain shrouded in secrecy.
In a letter to US Secretary of State Marco Rubio on Monday, the group of House Democrats led by Rep. Joaquin Castro of Texas wrote that "Congress has a constitutional responsibility to be fully informed about the nuclear balance in the Middle East, the risk of escalation by any party to this conflict, and the administration's planning and contingencies for such scenarios," particularly as it wages war on Iran in partnership with the Israeli government.
"The risks of miscalculation, escalation, and nuclear use in this environment are not theoretical," the lawmakers wrote. "A policy of official ambiguity about the nuclear capabilities of one party to this conflict makes coherent nonproliferation policy in the Middle East impossible, for Iran, for Saudi Arabia, and for every other state in the region making decisions based on their perceptions of the capabilities of their neighbors."
The House Democrats pressed Rubio to provide detailed information the US possesses about Israel's nuclear weapons program, including the country's current fissile material capability, nuclear doctrine, and "any indications of Israel planning to use or deploy nuclear weapons during the recent Iran conflict or during other conflicts."
Israeli leaders have for decades maintained a posture of deliberate ambiguity regarding their country's nuclear weapons capacity, even as some officials have at times tacitly acknowledged the nation's nukes—including by suggesting they could be dropped on Gaza—and falsely claimed that Iran was on the verge of creating a nuclear weapon.
Israel is believed to have begun producing nuclear weapons in the 1960s, helped in part by uranium that US intelligence agencies suspected was obtained from a factory in the United States.
Analysts estimate that Israel currently has between 90 and 300 nuclear warheads, according to the Stockholm International Peace Research Institute (SIPRI).
"The United States’ indulgence of Israeli nuclear weapons has not escaped international attention, and the evident hypocrisy has undermined US nonproliferation policy," Victor Gilinsky, a former commissioner of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and Leonard Weiss, a visiting scholar at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, wrote in a March op-ed for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
"The US government’s public position continues to be that it does not know anything about Israeli nuclear weapons, and this will apparently continue until Israel releases the United States’ gag," Gilinsky and Weiss continued. "This policy is allegedly enforced by a secret federal bulletin that threatens disciplinary actions for any US official who publicly acknowledges Israel’s nuclear weapons."
Experts and anti-war campaigners applauded the group of House Democrats for demanding an end to the US government's official silence on Israel's nuclear weapons program.
"Washington’s silence on the program is indefensible amid the war in Iran and the acute threat of military escalation, they argue. And they are right," said Daryl Kimball, director of the Arms Control Association.
The advocacy group Win Without War thanked Castro and his colleagues for "breaking DC’s 'taboo' over the Israeli government's nuclear weapons—especially concerning as US and Israeli leaders wage a disastrous war of choice in the Middle East."
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Is Anyone Comforted When Trump Compares Iran War to Vietnam or Iraq?
The perspective of Vietnam and Iraq has taught Trump nothing. But the American people have learned from those experiences, and are not swallowing Trump’s lies.
May 05, 2026
As Trump’s War shambles on with no end in sight, President Trump asks us to put his “little excursion” “in perspective.” Compared to Vietnam and Iraq, Trump says, the Iran conflict has lasted “not very long at all.”
Does anyone find comfort in comparing the Iran disaster with two of America’s previous catastrophic wars?
Once, US forces had been in Vietnam for only two months. Then our involvement became unlimited and the war did not end until millions were dead, over ten years later.
The Iraq war was just a few days shy of two months old when Bush proclaimed: “Mission Accomplished!” Years of chaos, mass death and wasted trillions of dollars followed.
But neither the Vietnam war nor the Iraq war revealed its calamitous stupidity as swiftly as Trump’s war. Two months in, the American people and our standard of living, along with the entire world economy, have taken body blows.
Gasoline costs half again as much. Diesel has risen even more. Aviation gas has doubled. Food prices will soon follow because of shortages of key fertilizer ingredients – on top of Trump’s tariffs and the shortage of farm workers because of deportations.
Trump insists, however, that all will soon be well. Gas prices will “drop like a rock” after the war ends, says the president.
Can there be anyone left in America who believes Donald Trump’s promises on prices? This is the man who vowed in 2024 that if he were elected, “prices will come down and they’ll come down fast, with everything.” “When I win, I will immediately bring prices down.”
The same man who last year kept saying prices were down when everyone knew from their own experience that prices were up.
Can there be anyone left in America who believes Donald Trump’s promises on prices?
Two problems with his latest promise: First, Trump has no plan to end the war other than demanding Iran “cry uncle” and “give up.” But the Iranians are not convinced they lost, and few owners of $100 million dollar oil tankers, carrying up to $200 million worth of petroleum, are prepared to rely on Trump’s assurances of safety.
Second, the previous level of oil exports from the Persian Gulf will not resume when hostilities do end, and prices will not promptly drop. As economists say, oil prices “go up like a rocket and fall like a feather.”
World-wide oil inventories will have to be refilled, and oil industry experts point out that “high demand caused by replenishing the lost oil stock will keep prices elevated.”
Persian Gulf oil production suspended during the conflict will not immediately resume when it does end. Qatar, for example, provided 20% of the world’s supply of liquid natural gas. Their export facility was damaged by Iranian missiles, and will take three to five years to be fully brought back. Refineries throughout the region have been damaged and oil wells that have been shut down will take months to ramp back up
When will gas prices go back to pre-Trump War levels? Likely not any time this year. It will require two years to recover lost energy output, says the head of the International Energy Agency. And the rise in energy costs will ripple through the rest of the economy, pumping up inflation.
How did we get here?
Donald Trump and his government of feckless amateurs believed the US military would easily compel Iran’s unconditional surrender, as easily as American soldiers kidnapped the president of Venezuela. Since Trump surrounds himself with pretenders who know they must tell him only what he wants to hear, he launched his war without weighing the actual risks.
“President Trump and his aides were caught unprepared,” The Atlantic magazine reported, “when Iran . . . retaliated by targeting shipping in the Persian Gulf region and specifically through the Strait of Hormuz. . . The Trump administration acknowledged in classified briefings, CNN reported last night, that it did not make provisions for a closure” of Hormuz.
Iran struck back after being attacked? Who could have guessed?
Iran had been a major source of military drones to Russia, and Ukrainian and Russian drones had transformed the war in Ukraine. Hormuz was a known point of leverage. Still it did not occur to Trump or to War Secretary Pete “Lethality” Hegseth that American naval and air power might not suppress Iran’s drones and mines, giving Iran a choke hold on the Strait of Hormuz.
The perspective of Vietnam and Iraq has taught Trump nothing. But the American people have learned from those experiences, and are not swallowing Trump’s lies. Sixty-one percent disapprove of Trump’s handling of the Iran conflict and sixty-one percent believe he made the wrong decision in deciding to use military force in Iran.
Can public opinion and political reality force Trump to reverse course? Trump’s need to call his debacle a success make that difficult, and Trump may yet turn to committing war crimes in a desperate effort to make Iran capitulate.
If members of his own party will not join in attempts to restrain an increasingly frantic, erratic and likely impaired president, America’s military may be forced to confront their duty to defy Donald Trump’s illegal and immoral orders.
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