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President Donald Trump fired top US military officer General Charles “CQ” Brown on Friday, part of a major shake-up of the armed forces’ leadership.Trump offered no explanation for Brown’s dismissal less than two years into his four-year term as chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, which followed sweeping layoffs of federal workers and moves to dismantle government institutions just a month into the president’s second term.Brown had been nominated to the top military role by Democratic president Joe Biden and became only the second Black person to hold the position. Following Trump’s announcement on Brown, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said he was seeking a replacement for Admiral Lisa Franchetti, the first woman to serve as the top US Navy officer.Trump thanked Brown for “his over 40 years of service to our country” in a post on his Truth Social platform, describing him as “a fine gentleman and an outstanding leader.”Brown has commanded a fighter squadron and two fighter wings, as well as US air forces under the Central Command and Indo-Pacific Command. He had served as Joint Chiefs chairman since October 2023.Following the 2020 murder of a Black man, George Floyd, by a white police officer in Minnesota, Brown — an experienced fighter pilot with more than 3,000 flight hours, 130 of them in combat — recorded an emotional video about his personal experiences, including with discrimination in the US military.”I’m thinking about my Air Force career, where I was often the only African American in my squadron or as a senior officer, the only African American in the room,” Brown said.”I’m thinking about the pressure I felt to perform error-free, especially for supervisors I perceive had expected less from me as an African American.”- Top Navy officer being replaced -Hegseth had advocated for Brown’s firing in a November podcast appearance, saying any top officers “involved in any of the DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion) woke shit has got to go,” but told journalists last month that he was “looking forward to working” with the general.Trump said he was nominating Air Force Lieutenant General Dan Caine to replace Brown.He said Caine — whom he recently described meeting in Iraq during his first term — is “an accomplished pilot, national security expert, successful entrepreneur, and a ‘warfighter’ with significant interagency and special operations experience.”Caine served in positions including associate director for military affairs at the CIA, as well as in various operational and staff roles, including more than 150 hours in combat as an F-16 pilot, an aircraft in which he logged more than 2,800 hours.Trump, in his trademark showman style, told a Saudi investor forum in Miami on Wednesday about meeting Caine in Iraq, where he was among a group of “handsome people, everybody’s like from a movie set.”According to Trump, Caine told the president that he went by the nickname “Razin.””I said, wait a minute, your name is Razin Caine? I love you, I’ve been looking for you for five years … this is what I want,” Trump recounted.In another major Pentagon shakeup, Hegseth said he was seeking a replacement for Franchetti, the first woman to serve as chief of naval operations and on the Joint Chiefs of Staff.”I am… requesting nominations for the positions of chief of naval operations and Air Force vice chief of staff,” Hegseth said in a statement.”The incumbents in these important roles, Admiral Lisa Franchetti and General James Slife, respectively, have had distinguished careers. We thank them for their service and dedication to our country,” he said, without providing an explanation for their departures.Franchetti had previously served on a series of surface vessels, commanding a guided missile destroyer, a destroyer squadron and two carrier strike groups.She was deputy commander of US naval forces in Europe and as well as in Africa, and deputy chief of naval operations for warfighting development. She became vice chief of naval operations — the service’s number two position — in September 2022, and took over the Navy’s top job in November 2023.

US President Donald Trump had a heated exchange with a Democratic governor Friday over his order barring transgender athletes from women’s sports, with the state leader telling him: “See you in court.”The Republican president was making televised remarks to a gathering of the country’s governors at the White House when he raised the executive order he signed earlier this month.”Two weeks ago I signed an executive order banning men from playing in women’s sports. Many Democrats are fighting me on that, I hope you continue because you’ll never win another race,” he said. The ban is “to protect women,” he claimed.”Are you not going to comply with it?” he asked Janet Mills,  governor of the northeastern state of Maine.”I’m complying with state and federal laws,” Mills responded. “Well, we are the federal law… You better do it, because you’re not going to get any federal funding at all if you don’t,” the president said. “See you in court,” she responded.”Good, I’ll see you in court. I look forward to that. That should be a real easy one. And enjoy your life after governor, because I don’t think you’ll be in elected politics,” a visibly angry Trump replied. Trump’s order allows US government agencies to deny funds to schools that allow transgender athletes to compete on women’s teams.Some Maine officials have said they will continue a policy of allowing transgender students to choose which team they play on, citing state law under the Maine Human Rights Act, according to the Portland Press Herald. Mills and the state’s attorney general have vowed to fight any move to deny the state federal funds, the newspaper reported. – ‘Violation’ -Later Friday, the Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights announced an investigation into Maine’s education department for alleged violations of Title IX, the landmark civil rights law that forbids discrimination on the basis of gender in educational facilities that receive federal support. A statement cited allegations that Maine’s education department “continues to allow male athletes to compete in girls’ interscholastic athletics and that it has denied female athletes female-only intimate facilities, thereby violating federal antidiscrimination law.”Craig Trainor, DoE acting Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights, said Maine must comply with Title IX to continue receiving federal funds.”If it wants to forgo federal funds and continue to trample the rights of its young female athletes, that, too, is its choice,” he said in the statement. Mills called it a “politically directed move” to strip funding “paid for by Maine taxpayers.””This is not just about who can compete on the athletic field, this is about whether a President can force compliance with his will, without regard for the rule of law that governs our nation,” she added.Republicans hammered Democrats on transgender issues — especially when it came to youth and sports — ahead of the 2024 election, capitalizing on a broader culture war over LGBTQ rights.Since his return to power, Trump has demonized any recognition of gender diversity, attacking transgender people — a small minority of the population — and gender-affirming care for minors in both his rhetoric and in executive orders.Trump has said he will also push the International Olympic Committee to change its rules on transgender athletes before the 2028 Los Angeles Games.

Blue baseball caps and T-shirts sporting a continental version of Donald Trump’s political rallying cry — “Make Europe Great Again” — abound at a gigantic conference center near the US capital Washington this week. Leaders across the European right have arrived at the annual Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) in droves, seeking ideas and insights from those at the heart of the movement that has reshaped the United States.”This idea of America First, it also refers to what we would like, that is to say a little Europe First,” Raphael Audouard, director of the Fondation des Patriotes pour l’Europe (Patriots for Europe Foundation), told AFP. “The return to national borders, which is what Trump is defending, echoes what we’re defending in different European countries,” said the 32-year-old Frenchman, whose group is affiliated with the group of the same name in the European Parliament. CPAC is an annual gathering of conservative leaders and activists that this year is celebrating Trump’s return to the White House, with members of his administration and political allies featuring heavily among the speakers.Many of the American attendees are “happy” to see that Trump’s brand of bombastic populism is also inspiring European leaders, Audouard said.But even amid the meeting of minds, he sounded a note of warning.”We’re aware that we shouldn’t be naive,” he said.”Trump wants America first. But America first is not Europe first.”- ‘Trump revolution’ -Party leaders such as Britain’s Nigel Farage, and prime ministers such as Slovakia’s Robert Fico were among those making the pilgrimage.Not all were singing from the same choir book.France’s Jordan Bardella, a member of the European Parliament and head of his country’s anti-immigration National Rally (RN) party, announced he was canceling a speech to CPAC scheduled for Friday after Trump ally Steve Bannon made an apparent Nazi salute onstage a day earlier.Others said they had come merely in the spirit of inquiry. Romanian Diana Iovanici-Sosoaca, also a member of the European Parliament, explained that she was there out of “a curiosity what is happening here.””There were times when Europe was great. Now it’s low, it’s down,” said the lawmaker, who first made a name for herself on social networks in Romania for her opposition to anti-Covid measures. That sense of a Europe in decline was a recurring theme among its attendees. “Patriotic Brits… look across the Atlantic with envy,” former British prime minister Liz Truss said in one CPAC speech. “We want a Trump revolution in Britain,” she said. “We want to be part of the second American revolution.” Trump’s cost cutter-in-chief Elon Musk, who took the stage Thursday swinging a chainsaw presented to him by Argentina’s President Javier Milei, called Europe a “collapsing society.””It feels that way. It feels like France was nicer 50 years ago than it is today,” claimed the world’s richest person, who has made himself the US president’s most powerful ally. Former Polish prime minister Mateusz Morawiecki told AFP the continent has focused on “stupid priorities… on the wrong priorities, like accommodating as many illegal migrants as possible.”The US and Europe are experiencing “a difficult and very dangerous moment when both parts of the transatlantic community, so to say, are getting more and more away from each other. And I’m very much concerned about this,” he said.”I try to explain, translate the European language to the American language and vice versa. That’s my major objective here.”

The chief prosecutor in Los Angeles will oppose an attempt by Erik and Lyle Menendez to get a new trial for the bloody 1989 murder of their wealthy parents, he said Friday.The pair were jailed for life after a blockbuster legal drama in the 1990s detailing the gruesome slayings of Jose and Kitty Menendez at the family’s luxury Beverly Hills mansion.But a growing campaign to free the brothers — given new life by a hit Netflix series — has tried to open the door to new legal maneuvers that could see them re-tried, have their sentences reduced or even granted clemency.Prosecutors in Los Angeles had previously appeared receptive, but newly installed District Attorney Nathan Hochman on Friday said he was opposed to any new trial.”We conclude, in our informal response that the court should deny the current habeas petition by the Menendez brothers,” Hochman told reporters, referring to a motion filed by the men’s lawyers that would effectively vacate their convictions.In a highly detailed press conference, Hochman laid out his department’s thinking after a review of the 50,000-page case file.He said his office did not believe the standard for a habeas hearing had been reached, in part because there were doubts over the veracity of evidence the defense was relying on.Erik, now 54, and Lyle, 57, have spent more than three decades behind bars.During two trials in the 1990s that gripped America, prosecutors painted their parents’ shotgun murders as a cold-hearted bid by the then-young men — Lyle was 21 and Erik was 18 — to get their hands on their parents’ $14 million fortune.But their attorneys described the 1989 killings as an act of desperate self-defense by young men subjected to years of sexual abuse and psychological violence at the hands of a tyrannical father and a complicit mother.The case saw a huge surge of renewed interest last year with the release of the Netflix hit “Monsters: The Lyle and Erik Menendez Story.”- Clemency -Hochman on Friday said the men had offered five disparate explanations for the deaths of their parents, ranging from an initial claim that it was a Mafia hit to the self-defense that they ultimately relied on at trial.The problem, he said, was that even if they had suffered sexual abuse, that did not constitute grounds for self-defense, a point their attorney during the original trials conceded.Asked whether he believed the men had been abused, he replied: “What I believe is that they testified to that sexual abuse… in great detail. “I also understand that when it came to any corroborating information about that sexual abuse, it was extremely lacking. In fact… that was their fourth version. In other words, they didn’t come out initially and say: ‘We killed our parents because our father sexually abused us’.”Hochman said the decision on whether to grant the habeas motion was one for the courts, as would be any decision on a re-sentencing.The prosecutor’s office will issue its opinion on that in the coming weeks, with a court hearing on the issue scheduled for March 20-21.As for the third route to freedom available to the men: California Governor Gavin Newsom “has the clemency petition on his desk, and he can do whatever he wants, whenever he wants,” Hochman said.

The US Defense Department will cut its civilian workforce by at least five percent starting next week, the Pentagon said Friday, as President Donald Trump continues slashing the government payroll.Trump’s administration has already begun firing thousands of other federal workers who are on probationary status, and the cuts at the Defense Department — the largest employer in the United States — will also focus on recently hired employees.”We anticipate reducing the department’s civilian workforce by 5-8 percent to produce efficiencies and refocus the department on the president’s priorities and restoring readiness in the force,” Darin Selnick, who is performing the duties of under secretary of defense for personnel and readiness, said in a statement.”We expect approximately 5,400 probationary workers will be released beginning next week as part of this initial effort, after which we will implement a hiring freeze while we conduct a further analysis of our personnel needs,” Selnick said.The Defense Department employs more than 900,000 civilians, meaning that cuts of five percent would affect a total of more than 45,000 jobs.A day before the announcement, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth said in a video message that “it is simply not in the public interest to retain individuals whose contributions are not mission critical.””Common sense would tell us where we should start, right — we start with poor performers amongst our probationary employees,” Hegseth said.- Promoting ‘best and brightest’ -“When you look at head count, we’re going to be thoughtful, but we’re also going to be aggressive, up and down the chain, to find the places where we can ensure the best and brightest are promoted based on merit.”Hegseth also said that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) would have “broad access” to root out the previous administration’s programs from the Pentagon.DOGE will work to “find the redundancies and identify the last vestiges of Biden priorities — the DEI (diversity, equity and inclusion), the woke, the climate change BS — that’s not core to our mission, and we’re going to get rid of it all,” he said, referring to former president Joe Biden.Musk — the world’s richest person and Trump’s biggest donor — has led the effort to fire swaths of the federal workforce, sparking various legal challenges.A US judge on Tuesday declined a request to temporarily block Musk and DOGE from firing federal employees and accessing agency data after 14 Democratic-ruled states filed suit contesting the billionaire’s legal authority.Judge Tanya Chutkan said the plaintiffs had not sufficiently showed that they would suffer “imminent, irreparable harm” unless a temporary restraining order was issued.And on Thursday, Judge Christopher Cooper denied a union bid to temporarily halt the sacking of federal workers, saying he lacked the jurisdiction to handle the complaint.

The Associated Press filed a lawsuit against three White House officials on Friday after the news agency was barred from some of US President Donald Trump’s events.The AP, in the suit filed in a federal court in Washington, said the denial of access violates the First Amendment of the US Constitution, which guarantees freedom of speech and of the press.The White House began blocking AP journalists from the Oval Office 10 days ago over the news agency’s refusal to follow Trump’s executive order renaming the Gulf of Mexico the “Gulf of America.”The ban on AP reporters was later extended to Air Force One.The news group said it was bringing the suit against three Trump administration officials to “vindicate its rights to the editorial independence guaranteed by the United States Constitution.””The White House has ordered The Associated Press to use certain words in its coverage or else face an indefinite denial of access,” the AP said.”The press and all people in the United States have the right to choose their own words and not be retaliated against by the government,” it said.”The Constitution does not allow the government to control speech. Allowing such government control and retaliation to stand is a threat to every American’s freedom.”The suit names as defendants White House chief of staff Susan Wiles and deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich, as well as White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt.”We’ll see them in court,” Leavitt said during an appearance Friday at the Conservative Political Action Conference in Washington. “We feel we are in the right. We are going to ensure that truth and accuracy is present at that White House every single day,” she said.In its style guide, the AP noted that the Gulf of Mexico has “carried that name for more than 400 years.””The Associated Press will refer to it by its original name while acknowledging the new name Trump has chosen,” it said.”As a global news agency that disseminates news around the world, the AP must ensure that place names and geography are easily recognizable to all audiences.”Trump called the AP a “radical left organization” on Thursday and said the new Gulf of America name is “something that we feel strongly about.”His leveraging of press access underscores the Republican president’s longstanding animosity toward traditional news outlets, which he accuses of bias against him.The White House Correspondents’ Association has called AP’s exclusion from Trump events “outrageous.”The 180-year-old news agency has long been a pillar of US journalism and provides news to print, TV and radio outlets across the United States and around the world. 

Los Angeles Mayor Karen Bass sacked the city’s fire chief on Friday, blaming her for leadership failures in the handling of deadly blazes that tore through the California metropolis in January.The axing of Kristin Crowley comes six weeks after America’s second most populous city was ravaged by fires that left at least 29 people dead and vast areas in ruins.It also comes as angry residents continue to look for someone to blame for the fires.”Acting in the best interest of Los Angeles public safety and for the operations of the Los Angeles Fire Department, I just met with Chief Crowley and removed her as fire chief,” Bass told reporters.The mayor said she has called for a full investigation of “everything” leading up to  January 7 when the fires began. “A necessary step to the investigation was the president of the fire commission telling Chief Crowley to do an after-action report on the fires. The fire chief refused,” Bass said.”We all know that 1,000 firefighters that could have been on duty on the morning the fires broke were instead sent home on Chief Crowley’s watch. These actions required her removal.”Tensions had flared between the two officials even as flames raged in the Pacific Palisades and Altadena neighborhoods.There was sharp criticism over the firefight, particularly in the tony Pacific Palisades area, where hydrants ran dry because of huge demands on the system.Just days after the wind-driven fires broke out, Crowley blindsided city bosses by telling a local television interviewer that Los Angeles had failed her department, which she described as understaffed and underfunded.”My message is the fire department needs to be properly funded,” Crowley told the local Fox television channel. “It’s not.”An appearance on national TV compounded the rift when she told CNN that budget cuts had directly affected her ability to fight the mammoth fires.Hours later, Bass hauled Crowley in for a closed-door meeting that ran so late Bass missed a scheduled news briefing.The next time the two stood together at a press conference, tensions were evident, despite pledges that they were on the same page.- Foreign trip -Bass’s move Friday comes after weeks of criticism levelled at her.The former US congresswoman has frequently been the target of residents’ ire in recent weeks after a flat-footed response to the fires, which broke out while she was in Ghana.Ahead of the January 7 outbreaks, the National Weather Service had been warning that fierce winds and exceedingly dry weather would leave the Los Angeles region at very high risk of a fire.State and local officials announced they were pre-positioning resources to pounce and try to keep a handle on any blazes that they expected would spread rapidly in 100-mile (160-kilometer)-per-hour winds.Local and national media extensively carried warnings of the elevated danger.But at a press conference Friday, Bass framed her decision to press ahead with her foreign trip as the result of Crowley’s failure to warn her of the risk.”What has happened in the two-plus years I’ve been here every time there was a weather emergency, or even a hint of a weather emergency, the chief has called me directly,” Bass told reporters.”She has my cell phone. She knows she can call me 24/7, and she briefed me, and then we would talk about what needed to happen next. That did not happen this time.”

An American-Lebanese man was found guilty Friday of attempting to kill novelist Salman Rushdie when storming a stage and repeatedly plunging a knife into the “Satanic Verses” author.Hadi Matar faces up to 25 years in prison and will be sentenced in April after being convicted of attempted murder and assault charges over the 2022 attack.Matar’s legal team had sought to prevent witnesses from characterizing Rushdie as a victim of persecution following Iran’s 1989 fatwa calling for his murder over supposed blasphemy in “The Satanic Verses.”Rushdie had told jurors of Matar “stabbing and slashing” him during an event at an upscale cultural center in rural New York.”It was a stab wound in my eye, intensely painful, after that I was screaming because of the pain,” Rushdie said, adding he was left in a “lake of blood.”He said it “occurred to me I was dying” before he was helicoptered to a trauma hospital.Jurors heard closing arguments from both prosecutors and defense lawyers before retiring briefly to consider their verdict Friday. They deliberated for less than two hours.Matar was found guilty of stabbing Rushdie about 10 times with a six-inch blade that had been shown to witnesses and the court.The defendant shouted pro-Palestinian slogans on several occasions during the trial.- Free speech v. blasphemy -Matar, from New Jersey, previously told media he had only read two pages of “The Satanic Verses” but believed the author had “attacked Islam.”After the novel was published in 1988, Rushdie became the center of a fierce tug-of-war between free speech advocates and those who insisted that insulting religion, particularly Islam, was unacceptable in any circumstance.Books and bookshops were torched, his Japanese translator was murdered and his Norwegian publisher was shot several times.Rushdie lived in seclusion in London for a decade after the 1989 fatwa, but for the past 20 years — until the attack — he lived relatively normally in New York.Last year, he published a memoir called “Knife” in which he recounted the near-death experience.The optical nerve of Rushdie’s right eye was severed, and he told the court that “it was decided the eye would be stitched shut to allow it to moisturize. It was quite a painful operation — which I don’t recommend.”Asked to describe the intensity of the pain over the attack, he said it was “a 10″ out of 10.His Adam’s apple was also lacerated, his liver and small bowel penetrated, and severe nerve damage to his arm left him paralyzed in one hand.”The first thing I said on regaining the ability of speech was ‘I can speak’,” he said to stifled laughter from jurors.British-American Rushdie, now 77, was rescued from Matar by bystanders.Venue employee Jordan Steves had told the court how he launched himself “with my right shoulder with as much force as I could manage” to help others subdue the suspect.He pointed to Matar, sitting just feet away in the ornate courtroom, when asked to identify the attacker.Iran-backed Lebanese Shiite militant organization Hezbollah endorsed the fatwa on Rushdie, the FBI has said, and Matar faces a separate prosecution in US federal court on terrorism charges.Iran has denied any link to the attacker and said only Rushdie was to blame for the incident.

A measles outbreak that began in northwest Texas last month has now sickened 90 people, the vast majority of whom were unvaccinated, according to state data released Friday — and the figure is expected to rise further.The outbreak comes as Robert F. Kennedy Jr. begins his tenure as US health secretary, a role that grants him significant authority over immunization policy.Kennedy, a vocal vaccine skeptic, has repeatedly and falsely linked the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine to autism, a claim widely debunked by scientific research.At least 77 of the cases in Texas involve children, while 10 are adults, with data unavailable for the remaining three.Sixteen patients have been hospitalized with the highly contagious disease, which is best known for its rash but can also cause pneumonia, brain swelling and other severe complications.Only five of the cases have been reported among vaccinated individuals. The majority of patients were unvaccinated, or their vaccination status remains unknown.Infants are not eligible for their first dose of the MMR vaccine until 12 to 15 months of age, leaving them vulnerable in early life. People with immune-compromising conditions are also at higher risk of severe illness.Childhood vaccination rates have been declining across the US, a trend that accelerated during the Covid-19 pandemic amid concerns over the rapid deployment of mRNA vaccines and widespread misinformation, further eroding public trust in health institutions.The outbreak epicenter is Gaines County in west-central Texas, which has reported 57 confirmed cases.Texas law allows vaccine exemptions for reasons of conscience, including religious beliefs. The county is home to a significant Mennonite community, a Christian sect that has historically shown vaccine hesitancy.In 2023, the US reported 285 measles cases, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). The worst recent outbreak occurred in 2019, when 1,274 cases — mostly within Orthodox Jewish communities in New York and New Jersey — resulted in the highest national total in decades.Before the measles vaccine was introduced in 1963, the disease infected an estimated three to four million Americans annually, according to the CDC.While measles was declared eliminated in the US in 2000, outbreaks continue to occur each year. Globally, the disease remains a major killer, claiming tens of thousands of lives annually.Meanwhile, the Trump administration has postponed a routine meeting of an independent advisory panel that makes vaccine recommendations to the CDC.The meeting, originally set for February 26-28, was scheduled to discuss vaccines for meningococcal disease, influenza and chikungunya, a viral disease that causes fever and joint pain.The CDC website now states that the meeting was postponed to “accommodate public comment in advance of the meeting,” but no new date has been announced.

President Donald Trump, yes. But what about King Trump or even Donald Caesar?The thoroughly un-American idea has been aired repeatedly in Washington since the Republican began his second term a month ago.And it’s not just radiating from the wild fringes of Trump’s nationalist-populist Make America Great Again movement known as MAGA.It’s coming from the 78-year-old billionaire himself.”LONG LIVE THE KING!” Trump crowed Wednesday on his Truth Social platform to celebrate his government’s nixing of the New York City congestion pricing plan.The White House then posted a fake magazine cover on its official X account, repeating the slogan and showing Trump wearing a golden crown.Trump has a long history of suggesting he might serve more than the two terms allowed by the US Constitution.What was often dismissed as joking during his first term looked darker after Trump refused to concede his 2020 loss to Joe Biden, then stoked his millions of followers to believe the election was rigged — culminating with the January 6, 2021 assault on the US Capitol.As Trump launches his second presidency with an unprecedented demonstration of executive power — using the world’s richest man Elon Musk to dismantle swaths of the government — giddy supporters want even more.Much more.- Donald Caesar? Napoleon? -“We love the idea of Trump as our Julius Caesar-type figure,” Shane Trejo, from a group called Republicans for National Renewal, told reporters at the conservative CPAC conference in Washington.Trejo stood alongside a poster showing the elderly Trump as a rather more youthful Roman emperor with a chiseled face, laurel wreath and a toga.Mixing his imperial metaphors, Trejo also described Trump as a “Napoleonic figure” capable of leading “our country out of perdition and into greatness.”Republicans for National Renewal is lobbying Congress to approve a constitutional amendment to the two-terms limit.According to the House Republican who introduced the resolution, Andy Ogles of Tennessee, Trump is “the only figure in modern history capable of reversing our nation’s decay and restoring America to greatness” and therefore should be given more time in power.Amending the constitution would require a two-thirds majority in both the House and Senate. That’s all but impossible to achieve.But Republicans for National Renewal’s website proposes emulating a trick used by Russia’s Vladimir Putin and working around the term limits by getting a placeholder elected instead.In the US version, Trump’s son Don Jr. “could run on a Trump/Trump ticket before gracefully resigning on Jan. 21, 2028 after securing victory,” the website says.”This plan while unorthodox would show that MAGA cannot be stopped by any procedural rule.”Another supporter calling to extend the Trump era is former advisor and highly influential right-wing strategist Steve Bannon.”We want Trump in ’28,” Bannon said at CPAC. “A man like Trump comes along only once or twice in a country’s history.”Bannon, who emulated a viral Musk moment from January in making what looked like a Nazi salute from the stage, led the crowd in chants of, “We want Trump!”Trump has done nothing to tamp down the talk, even if it goes against the grain of the founding US principles.Just this Thursday, Trump asked guests at a White House event: “Should I run again?”The response was shouts of “Four more years!”No chance, say the constitutionalists.But Trump clearly is thrilled by the controversy — and sure that the crown fits.”He who saves his Country does not violate any Law,” Trump wrote on Truth Social last week.The origin of the phrase, according to some historians? Napoleon Bonaparte — the French general who crowned himself emperor in 1804.