Trump has zero intention of leaving and it's time for a lot of folks to wake up.

[Metaphorical]

67. Yes he is laying the foundation to be president for life

I am amazed here that people believe that Trump will follow the constitution here. He believes he deserves to be president, and sees the Constitution as just an inconvenient piece of paper that he mostly ignore.

Right now we are in extra-constitutional times. Trump can simply declare that he's president for life, and this Congress will ratify it, even if the Supreme Court strikes it down (assuming that they will, which is a big assumption).

This is one of the reasons that I keep making the assertion that we are currently IN a warm Civil War. The Constitution no longer applies - or rather, it has been weaponized and is only selectively and capriciously enforced, which amounts to the same thing. Everything Trump does at this point is by executive order, and if an executive order gets found unconstitutional, he'll just sic his goon squad on the judge until they back down.

What this means in practice is that the states are basically on their own. I think Newsum, Ferguson, Prizker and others recognize that. They are not going to formally secede, because they still hope to salvage SOMETHING post-Trump, but they are going to effectively ignore any directive coming out of Washington DC, and will be creating alliances to act in concert against things like military "interventions". This is a warm Civil War - the President of the United States is using extraordinary powers to wage a war against portions of the country that he doesn't like.

I think it reasonable to assume that Trump is working by the Authoritarian Playback (keep in mind, his deputy chief of staff is Stephen Miller, an avowed neo-Nazi, and I suspect Miller has far more influence than his chief of staff). Trump's goal is essentially to consolidate power as a dictator, primarily because he knows that once he ceases being president, he WILL be prosecuted. The only real saving grace in all of this is that Trump is far too paranoid and narcissistic to try to create a dynasty.