Trump’s third term trial balloon: how extremist ideas become mainstream

The president has been testing the waters by suggesting he could run again, a familiar playbook of the Maga movement - and a distraction tactic

It is noon on 20 January 2029. In the biting cold of Washington, thousands of people are gathered on the National Mall to witness the swearing in of a new US president or, more accurately, an old US president: Donald Trump, aged 82, starting his third term in office.

The scene is the realm of fantasy or, for millions of Americans, the stuff of nightmares. But in Trump's own mind it is apparently not so far-fetched at all. Last weekend he told an interviewer that he is not joking" about another run and there are methods" to circumvent the constitution, which limits presidents to two terms.