Trump Edition: Why a third term is possible and the Chagos Islands deal
34:50 Share

Support for this podcast and the following message is brought to you by E-Trade from Morgan Stanley. With E-Trade, you can dive into the market with easy-to-use tools, $0 commissions, and a wide range of investments. And now there's even more to love. Get access to industry-leading research and insights from Morgan Stanley to help guide your decisions. Open an account and get up to $1,000 or more with a qualifying deposit.

Get started today at E-Trade.com. Terms and other fees apply. Investing involves risks. Morgan Stanley Smith Barney LLC member SIPC. E-Trade is a business of Morgan Stanley. They say I can't run again. That's the expression, sir. Then somebody said, I don't think you can. Oh, should I run again? You tell me.

We will measure our success not only by the battles we win, but also by the wars we end. At this point, I spent a lot of time with the president, and not once have I seen him do something that was mean or cruel. We're not going to be defeated. We're not going to be humiliated.

We're only going to win, win, win. We're going to win, win, win. I'm Venetia Raney and this is Battlelines: Trump Edition. It's Friday, 4th April 2025. On today's episode, we'll be looking at the hugely controversial Chagos Islands deal, after Donald Trump appeared to have signed off on selling it back to Mauritius earlier this week. What is the deal? What are the security implications for the UK, US and Asia? And why has Trump suddenly decided to back it?

Plus, could the Donald serve a third term? It's been the talk of the town in Washington after he told a reporter that a lot of people want him to do it. I'll be speaking to an American constitutional expert about how it's not just plausible, but perfectly legal.

But first, the Chagos Islands. Now, you've probably come across a headline or two about this archipelago in the Indian Ocean. Well, we're going to have some discussions about that very soon, and I have a feeling it's going to work out very well. They're talking about a very long-term, powerful lease, a very strong lease, and...

I think we'll be inclined to go along with your country. This week, Downing Street indicated that Donald Trump has signed off on Labour's deal to cede control of the islands to Mauritius, with the caveat that they will pay to maintain control of a joint US-UK base on the largest island, Diego Garcia, for the next 99 years. It's a tangled old story that takes in Britain's colonial days, a shadowy military outpost in the Indian Ocean, and the growing geopolitical power of China and India.

Our associate political editor, Tony Diver, formerly our US editor, has been following every twist and turn. So I'm very pleased to have him in the studio with me now. Thank you. Can you start by giving us a bit of the history of the Chagos Islands and how Britain became involved? Yeah. So the Chagos Islands were formerly a British colony, formed part of a British colony, because

Britain had ownership of Mauritius. When Mauritius was given independence in the late 1960s, the Chagos Islands were retained by the UK as what was then known as the British Indian Ocean Territory. And Britain formally still calls the islands that. And the reason that we hung on to them while giving away Mauritius and giving Mauritius its independence was because it forms a highly useful strategic base for the

and now American military to operate in the middle of the Indian Ocean. And so this deal has been in the works for some time. Mauritius has been claiming for decades that those islands should formally belong to them and not to us. And they've done that in the international courts. And so this latest round of talks was kicked off in 2019 when the International Court of Justice, which is a subsidiary of the United Nations, said that they should belong to Mauritius and not to the UK. And that was a non-binding ruling, but...

Ministers in the UK under the last Conservative government felt that it opened up a potential route and future for Mauritius to take back the islands through the courts. And it was felt that perhaps the safer thing to do was to open up negotiations to organise it bilaterally with Mauritius. It didn't really go anywhere under the Conservatives and there was a lot of feet being dragged by Conservative ministers, especially Lord Cameron, who was then Foreign Secretary, Grant Shapps was in as Defence Secretary.

But when Labour came into government, they inherited this ongoing dialogue with Mauritius over what happens to the islands. And very, very quickly, within months of Labour taking office, it was agreed that the islands were going to be handed over. Can you explain those differing positions? Why were the Conservatives against it? And why have Labour decided, yes, we're going ahead with this? Well, this is a tricky one for both parties. But fundamentally, it comes down to whether or not you think that giving over British territory...

to another country, which most people are against in one way or another, is more important than following what the international courts say about sovereignty and the extent to which you recognise those courts, their jurisdiction and the decisions that they've made. Pretty much every court which has ruled on this has said that the island should belong to Mauritius. But in many cases, historically, that hasn't really affected what Britain actually does. And so Keir Starmer, Lord Herma, the Attorney General are both huge fans of international law, have worked in international law for decades.

We know that they place a very high premium on these kind of judgments. And we know that they've probably taken the legal risk, which is the main reason for doing this deal extremely seriously. And so that's why I think we've seen over the last nine months or so a very, very fast process that had historically under the Conservatives been very slow.

The deal that Labour have put forward includes this caveat, right, about this island, Diego Garcia, where there's a US-UK base. Can you explain a bit of the history of this base and how it's been used in wars over the years? Absolutely. So pretty much this entire deal is about one island in the Czechoslovakian Islands. It's the largest island. It's the only island that you can really do anything with.

all of the islands were inhabited by the Chagossians, who were the native people there. Those people were forcibly removed by the British in the 1960s as we started to construct this military base. And that was always a joint project with the Americans. And what still is there today is a much beefed up

highly useful, vital strategic base in the middle of the Indian Ocean. When it was first conceived, this was all about communications, about setting up a communications base in the middle of the Indian Ocean, which would provide support and assistance to

troops operating around the world. Since then, it's become an air base and it was used in the war in Afghanistan for the Americans to conduct bombing runs into the Middle East. It's still used today. Just two weeks ago, we saw a buildup of American jets on this island. It's one of the most important things that Britain can offer to America in the special relationship because it gives America a foothold in that part of the world.

And, you know, as this podcast has covered extensively, that region of the world, the Indo-Pacific, is becoming more and more strategically important because of the rise of China and the kind of conflicts we see in the seas around China, and especially on tiny islands like this where all countries have been able to put their militaries.

So it feels like this is kind of a win-win for everyone. The US will keep control of this airbase along with the UK. Mauritius will get back the rest of the islands. Why has Shadow Foreign Secretary Priti Patel called it one of the worst foreign policy failures in years? I think there's two things. The first thing is that British politicians, especially conservative politicians, hate giving away territory. Britain has not given away any territory since we lost Hong Kong and that was done at the very tail end of the 20th century.

There isn't very much British overseas territory anymore, but there is a kind of conservative imagination, especially about the Falkland Islands and about this and about Gibraltar. These are always major flashpoints for conservative politicians because there is a sense of sort of declining British influence on the world stage and territory that we once held, which is being lost. So there is that argument going on. I think that's a legitimate argument and people have got very well-founded concerns about Britain becoming smaller on the world stage.

Thank you very much.

and you lease back the airbase, what you do is open the door to Chinese military build-up on the remaining islands. They could potentially put spying posts on those islands. They could see what Britain and America are doing on that base, and that, it's argued, could potentially compromise

British and American security in future. And the extent to which that would actually happen, what the security guarantees are in the deal, which we haven't seen, and how close Mauritius really is to China has been the substance of this debate and has been running since October, since the terms of the deal were first announced. What do we know about how close Mauritius is to China? Well,

China has been expanding massively in all countries across Africa, including Mauritius, and its Belt and Road Initiative has been building public infrastructure, has been lending a huge amount of money to African governments in order to improve public services, and those governments have generally been very receptive to that for obvious reasons. The concerns that the West has is that this gives China leverage over those countries and over Mauritius. Now, in the scheme of African nations and their relationship with China through the Belt and Road Initiative, Mauritius...

Mauritius is not really that intertwined with China. It's much more intertwined with India. But there is enough going on there that there have been security concerns been raised. Yeah, our colleague Iona Cleave went to Mauritius recently and did some really brilliant reporting about how, yes, Beijing has very deep economic ties with Mauritius. I believe Mauritius was the first African nation to sign a free trade agreement. That was back in 2021. China's helped build its airport, football stadium, hydroelectric dam and parts of its motorway.

but that India is the key player, and that's what you're getting to here. So can you explain the relationship between Mauritius and India for us? Well, Mauritius and India have an extremely strong relationship, and that historically has not been a problem for the West, for Britain and America. The Chagos Islands, which are pretty much slap bang in the middle of the Indian Ocean, are much closer to India than they are to China. Narendra Modi has been...

very sort of forward about saying that he wants Mauritius to be a key strategic ally. India has also taken over a separate group of islands to the Chagos Islands where they have been building their own military base. Agalaga. That's right. And that is, that's really where the sort of closest defence and economic ties are. Now, for obvious reasons, the UK doesn't have as many concerns about India's relationship with Mauritius as it does about China, because India is not the same kind of strategic threat.

Although there is the argument that India could always become a strategic threat in the future, and therefore having a key asset like that being influenced by another very powerful foreign government is not necessarily a great idea. There's another country we need to talk about in all of this, Iran. We've heard that there's been an increase in friendly, in air quotes, meetings between Mauritian ministers and Iranian officials. Why are they interested in these islands? Well, this was a story that was actually first revealed by The Telegraph, and it showed that the

Iranian ambassador to Madagascar, which is the largest nearby island to Mauritius, had been over there and having talks with various Mauritian ministers, including the Secretary of State for Education and the Secretary of State for Trade. What they were talking about is increasing Iranian investment on the Mauritian mainland, funding projects, sending academics over to Mauritian universities.

And that's raised some concerns because we know historically sending academics to universities in other countries is a way that the Iranian regime wields its influence. And they've done a bit of that in the UK. They've done a bit of it in the US. So there were some alarm bells going off about those meetings. In the last couple of weeks, we've also seen the Iranian foreign state press, Press TV, reporting that the

Chagos Islands and the base in Diego Garcia could be a possible point of retaliation for Iran, military strike on what is British territory, if there was to be an American strike on Iran. So it's being pulled into the mix of this wider conflict going on in the Middle East. And that's something which is going to be generating a lot of concern, especially when we're about to enter into an agreement where that territory is being given away. And an American strike on Iran, which is

very hypothetical at this point, but something that Israel, we believe, has been pushing for or was at some stage last year. That strike could involve the Chagos Islands, right? They could use this base on Diego Garcia. Absolutely. I mean, the Americans have bases elsewhere. They've got Mediterranean bases that they could use. They've got carrier strike groups, which are normally on patrols in that region. But yes, it's definitely within range of Diego Garcia. And we know that the Americans have got B-2 bombers there at the moment, which is probably the aircraft that you would use to conduct a strike like that. So

Yeah, hypothetically, if you're wargaming it, it's very likely that that base would be involved. So let's bring this back to Trump. You mentioned earlier Marco Rubio, Mike Waltz, not in favour of this deal. Why has Trump suddenly decided to apparently back it? This is the million dollar question, because we were all expecting Trump to come out against the deal. As I mentioned, many of his closest allies, including the chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, Jim Risch, who is a Trump ally and one of his closest advisors on foreign policy, have said that they think this deal is a bad idea from a security point of view.

But when Keir Starmer went over to visit Donald Trump and they talked about a range of issues, including trade, a journalist asked Trump what he thought about the Chagos deal. He said that they'd been discussing it, that he thought it sounded like a good idea and that he was minded to back it. He didn't say conclusively that he was going to, but he gave a strong indication that he was. Then earlier this week from Downing Street, we heard that the Americans had actually given the green light formally, that Britain was no longer waiting for any kind of

say so from Washington on this. And from now on, the deal will just be arranged bilaterally between the UK and Mauritius, which suggests that the kind of US veto unofficially, which existed after the election, has now all been signed off. Now, there's a lot of stuff going on behind the scenes here. We know that the Biden administration was very pro a deal because of some kind of sneaky beaky intelligence that was going on within the State Department and the

where it's argued that there are strong security and intelligence reasons for this deal to go ahead. There's been plenty of debate about what those reasons are, but we don't know for sure. It's possible that Trump has seen some of those arguments and has now decided it's a good idea. It's also possible that Britain's pretty successful charm offensive on America and inviting Donald Trump on a state visit to see the king and...

The kind of work that Keir Starmer has been doing since he got into government has played a part in this. And Trump has been willing to overlook concerns that he had on security. But until Trump sits down and gives an interview and explains his thinking on this, we won't know for sure. There's a sort of knowing look on your face. Are we allowed to sketch out some of what people think might be the security concerns?

The closest we got to it was when British ministers started discussing telecoms for the first time. That was the kind of most concrete reason that we've been given. And the argument from the Brits was that if there was a court ruling against the UK again in the UN Convention of the Law of the Seas court, which rules on maritime matters like this,

Although Britain wouldn't necessarily be required to hand over the islands because they don't have any powers of enforcement, it might mean that other third party UN bodies which operate on this island would no longer support the base. And the most important one of those is telecoms because the Chagos Islands has often been used as a British listening post. It's been used as a way of routing communications to British and American forces operating around the world. It

It was argued that if the UN's legal backing for those telecoms operations fell away, then the security of the base would be endangered. Now, there's then been lots of back and forth about whether or not that actually would happen, whether the court's ruling would be binding. But what we got was a flavor of the kind of security concerns going on behind the scenes. I suspect that a lot of the stuff that happens on Diego Garcia, we don't know about. And so there's probably a lot of these kinds of arguments happening behind closed doors that we will never truly understand. And the

And the government has offered Kemi Bain, not the leader of the opposition, a security briefing to tell her about these things, which we understand that she did accept. But no one on either side is allowed to discuss them. So we're slightly operating in the dark here and we have been for a while. Do we know what's going to happen now in terms of the talks? When is this actually going to happen now that the US have signed off on it?

Well, we thought they were pretty close. We thought earlier this week they were pretty close. And because the Americans have signed it off, it does mean that it's only between the UK and Mauritius to work out the terms of this deal. The Mauritians, since their election in November, have been pushing for more concessions from the UK.

Yeah.

Neither the British government nor the Mauritian government will discuss the details in public until the deal is finalised. So it's very possible we could get it tomorrow, but we might be waiting a few more weeks. Are MPs here going to have a say on it? In a way, yes, they will. The way that treaties are normally pushed through the Commons is that they're laid before MPs. There can be a debate and there can be a vote before they come into force, but the vote isn't binding on the government. The government has the royal prerogative to do whatever it wants in terms of overseas treaties.

What we know there will be is a bill laid before Parliament to implement the treaty, which will involve changing lots of bits of British law which refers to the British Indian Ocean Territory, potentially affects the sovereignty rights of Chagossians living in the UK, and lots of other smaller bits of law which are affected by this deal. There will be a vote on that bill, and that in theory gives MPs the ability to block the treaty being implemented. In reality, of course, the government has a large majority, and so that won't happen.

But what you can expect to see is plenty more discussion in Parliament about the sheer cost of this deal to Britain, which the Tories argue is a terrible deal because it both involves Britain giving territory away and also paying billions of pounds for it. And that is the crux of the argument politically. Just finally, you've mentioned the Chagossians and how a lot of them were expelled from the chain of islands when the British took it over. A lot of them live now here in London. How do they feel about this deal? Yeah, most of them live in Crawley, bizarrely. They all live just outside of Gatwick Airport. Yeah.

There have been some attempts to kind of canvass the opinion of Jagosians. There have been some unofficial polls. It's very difficult to do. And there was talk very early on in this process of running some kind of referendum to ask the Jagosians what they thought, which it was thought may give the UK some legal weight against these rulings in favour of Mauritius and the international courts. We don't actually have a clear idea. But the indications so far are that Jagosians who've settled in Britain already

fall with Britain on this issue mostly, don't want to see the islands given away. And that the Mauritian argument, the Chagossians are fundamentally a Mauritian people, doesn't really hold very much weight. They see themselves as an independent native people who are now aligned with Britain because many of them have been living here for a very long time. Great. Thanks so much for joining us. That's Tony Diver, our Associate Political Editor. Coming up after the break, we'll be talking about how Trump could serve a third term.

Support for this podcast and the following message is brought to you by E-Trade from Morgan Stanley. With E-Trade, you can dive into the market with easy-to-use tools, zero-dollar commissions, and a wide range of investments. And now there's even more to love. Get access to industry-leading research and insights from Morgan Stanley to help guide your decisions.

Welcome back.

This week there's been a lot of talk about Trump serving a third term after he mentioned it last weekend on a call with an NBC journalist. But it's far from the first time that he's brought it up. It will be the greatest honor of my life to serve not once but twice or three times or four times. Oh, I think I'm not allowed to run again. I'm not sure. Am I allowed to run again, Mike? I'd better not get you involved in that argument. They say I can't run again. That's the expression. Sir...

Then somebody said, I don't think you can. Oh. Should I run again? You tell me. Now look, this could just be another example of Trump enjoying stirring up controversy and enraging the left. The Constitution is very clear. No president can be elected for a third time. But there are other options that would be perfectly legal. Bruce Peabody is professor of political science at Farley Dickinson University in New Jersey, and he's written several papers on how a president could serve a third term.

I started by asking him how seriously the idea was being taken in the US. So I think people are taking the general discussion reasonably seriously. There's definitely a divide. There are those who think this is legally implausible, and there are those who believe it's legally quite sound. And I think people are taking it seriously as a kind of issue to explore, but

But in terms of how they assess it, there's really those two camps, if that makes sense. And you fall into the second camp. You wrote a landmark. You wrote a very significant article back in 1999 in the Minnesota Law Review titled The Twice and Future President.

and you examined the idea of how a president could, who had already served two terms, could become president again. You outlined six basic scenarios. Would you mind running through them for us? Sure, my pleasure. I like the word landmark. That's an excellent choice. So the idea that's kind of most commonly cited and that Mr. Trump himself referenced in his recent remarks is just the notion that

The president might, Mr. Trump, a twice elected president in general, might serve as a vice president. He would be elected to the office of the vice president and then the existing and elected president could resign.

or declare himself ineligible, and then Mr. Trump could become president through succession, right? So that's one scenario. Another scenario involves the question of whether Trump

Mr. Trump could be some of them are a little bit more technical, but in that specific scenario, the transition would take place presumably after Inauguration Day. But in some other constitutional scenarios, the president might be a vice president-elect serving with the president-elect and vice

There might be difficulties with the president-elect. Perhaps, again, he resigns or is disabled. That's another set of scenarios. And then there's another batch of ideas relate to the possibility of presidential succession. The United States has passed a Succession Act in 1947.

which lays out the conditions under which if the president or the vice president are not available, the vice president is the typical successor, right? The constitutionally designated successor, but in a kind of crisis or emergency where neither of those figures are available, who's next in line. And the succession act identifies currently identifies the famously the speaker of the house and then the president pro tempore, and then a series of figures connected to the executive branch cabinet and

But there's no reason in my analysis, there's no reason why a succession statute couldn't name a twice elected president, including perhaps Mr. Trump, as part of the succession statute. So those are some of the main ways. There's also a sort of technical question about whether if there's no electoral college majority,

and the House were to select a person to be the president, could that be a non-electoral means to assume the presidency and therefore kind of get around the language of the 22nd Amendment? That might be the most controversial in the sense that you could make a case that the House is choosing someone

of a candidate to be president in the context of a presidential election is still an election, but the constitutional language is different, right? It does use the word choosing and certainly a House election

of a president looks a little different than a national election resulting in an electoral college choice. You've used the word elected a bunch of times there and the 22nd Amendment is the key bit of legislation around all of this, right? And it restricts a president who has been elected twice for running for re-election. And your article really focuses on the fact that it's

If there's no re-election, then it could be constitutional, right? That's right. Yeah, we kind of jumped into the argument, but that is the crucial point, right? That for various reasons, that the language of the 22nd Amendment is quite explicit. No person shall be elected to the office of president more than twice. Well, that's interesting and important. And we typically think of election as the primary ways in which a person becomes president.

but it is by no means exhaustive, right? There are, as we just discussed, other mechanisms, other methods by which a person becomes or acts as president short of being elected to the office. So that language is pretty explicit. That language exists in a kind of network of other arrangements and mechanisms through which people become presidents. So I think that's kind of the heart of my argument and the reason and

any skeptics should, should have pause. This is not comprehensive language, but is, is a restriction that only affects a kind of subclass important, arguably the most important subclass of ways in which a person becomes president. You wrote that article in 1999. You've since revisited it and revised it in 2016. Um,

At the end of that article, you concluded, almost two decades after the publication of the twice and future president, the weight of legal, historical and policy arguments still falls on the side of permitting a twice elected president to lead the executive branch once again. Although you add that there's certainly both scholarly and popular uncertainty about this conclusion. I'm wondering if you were to revise it again today, and maybe you shudder at the thought, would your conclusion still be the same? My conclusion would still be the same, all right, regardless of

Whatever views I may or may not have regarding any individual candidate to the office, that's not relevant. Right. What's really relevant is the weight of, again, the legal, historical and I suppose to a lesser degree policy arguments and that weight that those arguments remain unchanged. There have been no profound changes.

or even minor changes in constitutional law or constitutional language that change the contours of the basic contention. This is an old phenomenon, right? So the 22nd Amendment was passed in

was proposed and ratified in a kind of spasm or fit is too, is too unkind or, or dismissive, but in a concentrated moment of opposition, partisan opposition to, to Franklin Roosevelt. And then within a very short period, uh,

the backers of Eisenhower or Republican were saying, gee, maybe we were too quick and maybe we ought to consider a repeal. So we judge constitutional language. We judge policy decisions. We judge our legal decision making more generally through a partisan lens or through the lens of a particular figure at our own risk. And I think that's true for the 22nd Amendment and for this larger question.

You mentioned Franklin Roosevelt. Just to remind our listeners that he ended up serving four terms. What was particular about those third, fourth terms that made American politicians decide that they needed to amend the Constitution in this way? So it certainly was unprecedented, Mr. Roosevelt's service. Prior to Franklin Roosevelt's third term, never mind his fourth, we'd had no president serve for more than two terms.

Now, there is reasons to think that certainly the founders, the framers of the Constitution,

weren't uniformly opposed to more than two terms of service. But in any event, we had an American tradition of two terms of service until FDR's third electoral victory in 1940. So that's significant. But on your question, I think the opposition shortly thereafter, shortly after Roosevelt serves just a part of his fourth term and then Mr. Truman takes over after Roosevelt's death,

And not long thereafter, within a few years, the Republican majorities take hold of the House and Senate for the first time in over a dozen years and quickly start to introduce measures to put in some restrictions on presidential service. And where do those come from? Again, I think they come partly from partisan politics, partly out of opposition to this very powerful figure serving for this unprecedented service.

Surely part of it is out of a sense that there was some deviation from this tradition of two term service. And I think more general concerns that Roosevelt, for a variety of reasons, had put together a real accretion of executive branch power, the twin threats of the Great Depression and then World War Two,

among other implications, played a major hand in strengthening the executive branch. And this was seen as an effort to try to rein back executive power. How easy is it to change the American Constitution? I know Republican Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee is trying to introduce a joint resolution to amend the Constitution to allow a third term for Trump. He's explicitly pro-Trump. But how doable is that?

So you can bet on all sorts of things in the 21st century. I wouldn't put a lot of money on the prospects of a constitutional amendment in terms of betting futures. So it's very difficult to amend the Constitution. We have, by some measures, the United States has the hardest constitution in the world to amend. There's some debate about the U.S. Constitution versus the Japanese Constitution.

But in any event, it's very hard to amend. The last time the United States had a normal constitutional amendment was in 1971. So this is a very difficult thing to do in general. And I would further note it is extremely difficult to do in our divided and hyper-partisan age. So

I don't think that's a terribly likely outcome. The constitution we have in 2025 is likely to be the constitution we will have for a number of years, if not a generation or more. For both those who are open to this argument that a twice-Elected President could serve again and opponents to it, I don't think constitutional amendment is a terribly promising source of clarity or revision. It's interesting because you've been writing about this issue obviously for decades.

It's not a Trump phenomenon, clearly. And there's been similar chatter around Ronald Reagan, Bill Clinton, Barack Obama. Why do you think this is catching so much attention right now? And do you think that's part of what Trump is trying to do? Bait the left, so to speak? One would never go wrong betting on that as at least one of his motivations, right? So that's a plausible interpretation. Some folks have also speculated that this is a way to

keep his political juices flowing, right? There is always the risk of a lame duck president during a second term in which the expectation is that will be your second and last term. So by teasing this suggestion that maybe he'll run again, he takes some of that sting out and arguably also proactively pushes his potential rivals aside, right? They can't start to position themselves if he's even a semi-plausible candidate. So

So, those are all factors, I think. And then, more generally, what everyone thinks of Mr. Trump, he is a norm shatterer. He's a person who is iconoclast in the sense that he is not afraid to smash or reconfigure accepted tenets and institutions. So,

He is either, depending on your point of view, the right or the wrong man for the job in the sense that he's willing to kind of push the law to its limits and think through what strictures there actually are. And again, set aside maybe norms about presidential service. So I think all those things do come together and make him a special messenger or vehicle for this conversation. And just finally, from a legal perspective, what would happen if he did resign?

try, say the most sort of most popularly spoken about route, he nominated himself as vice president and blah, blah, blah, stood with another candidate again for another term. Are there many legal challenge routes that you can think would instantly occur? It's a great question. And of course, many political scientists have looked foolish after making predictions. So I'll do so cautiously. But let's go with a scenario we've talked about in the scenario that Mr. Trump referenced. So

Just to lean into the hypothetical, Mr. Vance agrees to run as president. Mr. Trump serves as his vice president. This is all done in advance and let's suppose announced to the American electorate. You will be voting for J.D. Vance in name only, but on January 20th, 2029, he will resign shortly after noon and Mr. Trump will take over. So under those conditions,

One could certainly imagine lawsuits, right? You could imagine that either aggrieved rivals of Mr. Trump's or perhaps individual voters might say they have sustained a legal injury by virtue of this unconstitutional candidacy.

But at the end of the day, we would have to suppose that such a momentous issue and dramatic case would make its way up to the Supreme Court.

And one could make a pretty strong case, right, that the court, the current Supreme Court would be reluctant to overturn a national election and the votes of tens of millions of Americans, especially if they knew about this in advance, and especially if the only palpable injury might occur after January 20th, after this inauguration, after this transfer of power. So there might well be lawsuits about his candidacy on Congress.

on the ballot perhaps, and whether he would be ineligible to even be vice president. But after a national election in which the presumptive will of the people has chosen this ticket, it would seem like a political thicket that the court might well choose to avoid. It would be a heavy lift for the court to undo a national election. I can't imagine they would have much appetite for it, nevermind the possibility that they might actually be

Some of them might be delighted to have a third term Mr. Trump. So that's a snapshot of at least that scenario. Thank you so much for joining us on Battle Lines. It was my pleasure. So great to talk to you. That was Bruce Peabody, Professor of Political Science at Farley Dickinson University. That's all for today's episode of Battle Lines. We'll be back again on Monday. Until then, goodbye. Battle Lines is an original podcast from The Telegraph created by David Knowles and hosted by me, Venetia Rainey and Roland Oliphant.

If you appreciated this podcast, please consider following Battle Lines on your preferred podcast app. And if you have a moment, leave a review as it really helps others find the show. To stay on top of all of our news, subscribe to The Telegraph, sign up to our Dispatches newsletter or listen to our sister podcast, Ukraine The Latest. You can get in touch directly by emailing battlelines at telegraph.co.uk or contact us on X. You can find our handles in the show notes. The producer is Peter Shevlin. The executive producer is Louisa Wells.

Support for this podcast and the following message is brought to you by E-Trade from Morgan Stanley. With E-Trade, you can dive into the market with easy-to-use tools, zero-dollar commissions, and a wide range of investments. And now there's even more to love. Get access to industry-leading research and insights from Morgan Stanley to help guide your decisions. Open an account and get up to $1,000 or more with a qualifying deposit.

Get started today at E-Trade.com. Terms and other fees apply. Investing involves risks. Morgan Stanley Smith Barney, LLC. Member SIPC. E-Trade is a business of Morgan Stanley.

Make it a Vrbo.