"Betting money puts the odds of constitutional collapse in the United States at about one in 25. Anyone can wager three or four cents on Polymarket, Kalshi, or PredictIt that will pay out $1 if Donald Trump wins a third term in the 2028 election-an impossibility, according to the plain text of the Twenty-Second Amendment: "No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.""
"Dmitri Mehlhorn, a former Democratic strategist, thinks that the chance of political apocalypse is about 20 times higher-and that Americans need to start preparing now. He recently secured dual citizenship for his family on the Caribbean island of St. Kitts and is obsessively thinking through how people should respond if Trump tries to maintain power with the threat of force. He styles himself a doomsday philosopher of this worst-case scenario."
"On a Tuesday last month, this effort brought him to a co-working space in Manhattan's SoHo neighborhood to play a war game of sorts with about 15 finance professionals, nonprofit leaders, technology executives, and former Democratic-campaign advisers-and me. "Let's just use fiction to just imagine things so that we're not all bogged down in prose," Mehlhorn told the assembled players as the first glasses of wine were poured."
Market betting prices place the odds of a constitutional collapse at roughly 1 in 25 based on a wager that a president could win a prohibited third term. The Twenty-Second Amendment explicitly bars election to the presidency more than twice. Dmitri Mehlhorn assesses a substantially higher risk, has obtained dual citizenship for his family, and is developing public preparedness thinking for scenarios in which a term-limited president consolidates control of security forces. Mehlhorn convenes war-game sessions with professionals from finance, nonprofits, and technology to simulate a December 2025 scenario of power consolidation, pardons, and competing interests.
Read at The Atlantic
Unable to calculate read time
Collection
[
|
...
]