Nobody's sure how seriously to take Trump's suggestion he's owed 2 extra years in office

President Trump toyed with the idea of trying to unconstitutionally extend his term by two years on Sunday, tweeting that "they have stolen two years of my (our) presidency (Collusion Delusion) that we will never be able to get back," adding, "The Witch Hunt is over but we will never forget." The extra two years was suggested in Trump's retweet of evangelical leader Jerry Falwell Jr.'s proposal that Trump is owed "reparations," specifically "2 yrs added to his 1st term as pay back for time stolen by this corrupt failed coup."

Trump's "claim is that the first two years of his presidency, which he also says were the most successful in history, were denied to him by a Democratic-led putsch, in the form of the investigation into Russian interference in the 2016 election," translates Isaac Stanley-Becker at The Washington Post. "The probe was led by special counsel Robert S. Mueller III, a Republican, who was named by another Republican, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein."

Nobody seemed sure how seriously to take Trump's clearly illegal suggestion. On Saturday, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) said she was concerned Trump would refuse to leave the White House unless he lost by a decisive margin, echoing concerns raised by Trump's former lawyer-fixer Michael Cohen. UCLA constitutional law professor Jon Michaels agreed that we should take Trump's threat more seriously than it might seem to merit. "It's not like soccer where there's a penalty time, so they just add a couple minutes to the end of the game or the half," he told the Post.

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Other people were more sanguine. "If there were the remotest chance he were serious, and had power to put his words into effect, I might be concerned," said Michael W. McConnell, director of the Stanford Constitutional Law Center. "But he is not serious, and he could not do anything about it even if he were serious."