Would Trump Get to ‘Run Two More Times’ If He Is Not Impeached?

While he himself debunked the claim within hours, several readers contacted us asking if a scenario posted by disinformation purveyor and conspiracy theorist Jack Posobiec on October 1, 2019 was plausible.

“These Democrats don’t realize that if they impeach Trump and the Senate doesn’t confirm it then it nullifies Trump’s first term and he gets to run two more times. Read the Constitution, people,” Posobiec wrote on Twitter.

In reality, should the House vote to impeach United States President Donald Trump, the Senate would not “confirm it.” They would hold a trial; if two-thirds of Senate members vote to convict the president, he would be removed from office. But the latter result would not “nullify” his current term.

Posobiec later wrote that the tweet prompted critics to “actually read the Constitution,” attempting to play off the disinformation as a joke.

However, Jack Posobeic has a well-established reputation for spreading mistruths: he has tweeted, falsely, that former Federal Bureau of Investigation director James Comey said “under oath” that Trump did not ask him to stop an investigation; he promoted a repeatedly-debunked conspiracy theory about former Democratic National Committee staff member Seth Rich; and perhaps most notably, Posobeic had a substantial role in spreading the “Pizzagate” conspiracy theory.

In 2017, the far-right blog The Rebel also revealed that Posobiec — its one-time Washington, D.C. “correspondent” — had plagiarized content from white nationalist activist Jason Kessler.

It is a common trope for people specializing in propaganda to later claim that they were “joking,” as opposed to actual satirists. Whether or not the claim about the Constitution and impeachment was actually intended as such, it was, and remains, completely false.