Ah, another day in the Great American Experiment, which has long since devolved into a chemistry set fire in a middle school basement. Steve Bannon, a man who looks like he was fermented in a vat of cheap gin and discarded Breitbart printouts, has emerged from his latest legal hibernation to offer a vision of the future. It’s a vision involving a Mack truck, the U.S. Constitution, and the kind of disregard for legal boundaries that usually results in a high-speed chase on C-SPAN. Bannon’s recent proclamation that Donald Trump will 'drive a Mack truck through the 22nd Amendment' is the kind of quote that sends the liberal media into a state of elective tachycardia and makes the MAGA faithful reach for their commemorative gold-plated steering wheels. It is, in every sense, the perfect distillation of the modern American intellect: loud, destructive, and completely divorced from the reality of its own decay.

Let’s look at the players in this tragicomedy. On one side, we have the Democrats, who treat the Constitution like a holy relic that only they are holy enough to interpret, despite their penchant for ignoring whichever parts don’t suit their current fundraising goals. They respond to Bannon with the practiced horror of a Victorian governess discovering a dead mouse in the tea service. On the other side, we have the Bannonites—the collection of grifters and the terminally bored who view the supreme law of the land not as a framework for governance, but as a minor logistical hurdle, like a 'No Parking' sign outside a Chick-fil-A. They don't want a president; they want a permanent landlord who shares their grievances and validates their poorly spelled lawn signs.

The 22nd Amendment, for those who skipped civics class to huff paint behind the bleachers, is the one that prevents a person from being elected president more than twice. It was birthed from the collective panic of a nation that realized Franklin D. Roosevelt was planning to remain in office until the sun burned out. But Bannon, the self-appointed architect of the populist apocalypse, sees this as a mere suggestion. His metaphor of choice—the Mack truck—is particularly revealing. It’s not a scalpel; it’s not a legal argument; it’s a heavy, polluting, blunt-force object. It perfectly encapsulates the modern political strategy: why bother with the nuance of law when you can simply threaten to run over the guardrails? It's the rhetoric of a man who knows his audience prefers the smell of diesel to the dusty scent of logic.

The sheer intellectual laziness of this rhetoric is staggering. Bannon isn’t proposing a constitutional convention or a legitimate legal challenge. He’s proposing a tantrum. He’s selling the idea of a permanent presidency to a base that confuses 'freedom' with 'having my guy in charge forever.' It’s the ultimate expression of the strongman fetish that currently plagues the American Right—a desperate need for a daddy figure who will tell them they’re special while he dismantles the very institutions that protected their right to be idiots in the first place. They claim to love the Constitution, yet they cheer for its destruction as long as the person holding the sledgehammer is wearing a red hat.

Meanwhile, the Left’s reaction is equally exhausting. They scream about 'threats to democracy' while failing to offer anything more compelling than a slightly more polite version of the status quo. They are the people who bring a pamphlet on parliamentary procedure to a knife fight. They believe that if they just quote the Federalist Papers loudly enough, the Mack truck will suddenly obey the speed limit. It won’t. The truck doesn't care about your 'norms.' The truck is driven by a man who thinks 'checks and balances' refers to his ability to stiff contractors and hide his debt. The opposition’s fetish for 'institutional integrity' is as hollow as Bannon’s fetish for 'populist revolt.' Both are just different ways of avoiding the fact that the engine is already on fire.

And what of the Constitution itself? This piece of parchment, drafted by Enlightenment thinkers who couldn’t have imagined a world with TikTok or Diet Coke, is being used as a doormat by both sides. To the Right, it’s a pick-and-choose buffet where the Second Amendment is the main course and the rest is garnish. To the Left, it’s a living document that lives or dies based on the latest social media trend. Bannon’s 'Mack truck' isn’t just hitting an amendment; it’s hitting a void where a functioning national identity used to be. We have reached the point where the law is just another weapon in the culture war, a piece of heavy machinery to be weaponized by whichever side has the loudest horn.

The reality is that Bannon’s threats are mostly a marketing exercise. He needs to keep the rage machine greased, and nothing greases the gears like the promise of an eternal leader. It’s a grift, plain and simple. He’s selling a fantasy of power to people who feel powerless, and he’s using the Constitution as the stage for his theater of the absurd. Whether or not a third term is actually feasible is irrelevant; the point is the noise. The point is the vibration of the engine and the smell of the diesel. In the end, we are all just roadkill in the path of these competing delusions. We live in a country where the most prominent political strategist looks like he sleeps in a dumpster and talks like he’s narrating a low-budget reboot of the Book of Revelation. The Constitution isn't being defended; it's being fought over by two groups of people who wouldn't recognize a democratic principle if it bit them on their collective, over-privileged asses. So, let Bannon drive his truck. By the time he reaches the finish line, there won't be a road left to drive on anyway.