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It’s pretty safe to assume that President Donald Trump will talk in the near future about running for a third term even though the Constitution says he can’t.
Trump has shown no fear of contradicting the Constitution. He is actively trying to end birthright citizenship, for instance, even though it is protected in the 14th Amendment. Courts have blocked the effort for now.
He is quickly trying to shut down agencies created by Congress and to stop spending, or impound, money he disagrees with even though it was approved, like the Constitution says it should be, by Congress.
His vice president, JD Vance, has suggested the president could simply ignore courts.
He has recently leaned, at least on social media, into comparing himself to a king.
He has embraced outside-the-box readings of the Constitution and sometimes been rewarded. The court mostly endorsed his expansive view of immunity, ruling that presidents are largely exempt from criminal prosecution for their acts while in office. On the other hand, the court rejected the “independent state legislature” theory, which Trump and his allies used to try to overturn the 2020 election.
With all that in mind, how should Americans view Trump’s frequent jokes – if that’s what they are – about a third term? Trump is at the height of his power at the moment, with Republican majorities refusing to stand up to him in Congress.
Who knows what drama will come in the next four years, but Trump already likes to talk about the next election.
“It will be the greatest honor of my life to serve, not once but twice or three times or four times,” Trump said at rally in Nevada in late January, apparently joking and teasing that the comment would make for headlines. He later clarified: “No, it will be to serve twice. For the next four years, I will not rest.”
“Should I run again?” Trump asked supporters at a Black History Month event at the White House last week to chants of “Four more years!”
“There’s your controversy right there,” Trump said.
There are plenty of other examples from Trump and from his fiercest supporters.
At the Conservative Political Action Committee gathering just outside Washington, Stephen Bannon, who went to prison for contempt of Congress after refusing to testify before the House January 6 Committee, declared “we want Trump in ’28” and led the crowd in a chant.
In December, appearing at a dinner in New York, Bannon argued that Trump could get around the 22nd Amendment, which added a two-term presidential limit to the US Constitution in 1951, because the word “consecutive” is not in the text of the amendment.
In the House, Rep. Andy Ogles, a Tennessee Republican, has introduced legislation to begin the long process of tweaking the text of the 22nd Amendment and allowing a president who serves non-consecutive terms to serve a third four-year term. The wording of Ogles’ proposal would exclude two-term former presidents like Barack Obama from coming out of retirement.
Repealing or changing the 22nd Amendment would require two-thirds votes in both the House and the Senate and also the ratification by three-quarters of the states.
No amendment has been ratified since the 1990s and that one was first proposed in the 1700s. Otherwise, it’s been since the 1960s that the 26th Amendment was ratified during the Vietnam era when there was an active draft. That amendment guarantees the right to vote for 18 year-olds.
Even some Trump supporters are opposed to the idea of changing the Constitution for Trump.
Sen. Markwayne Mullin, the Oklahoma Republican, said he takes Trump’s comments “as a joke, not being literal.”
“I’m not changing the Constitution, first of all, unless – unless the American people chose to do that,” he said. It would take Mullin, every other Republican and a number of Democrats to get a two-thirds vote in the Senate to get the ball rolling on changing the Constitution. Don’t hold your breath.
The only president to serve more than two terms was Franklin D. Roosevelt. The 22nd Amendment was ratified in 1951, in the years following Roosevelt’s death in office.
The text is pretty clear:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.
“It’s illegal. He has no chance. That’s all there is to say,” Michael Waldman, president and CEO of the Brennan Center for Justice at NYU School of Law, told me in an email when I asked how seriously to take Trump’s jokes.
The legal reality may be that the Constitution prohibits a person from serving for a third term, but the political reality is that Trump has never been one to let the Constitution get in his way.
Nathan L. Gonzales, the editor of Inside Elections, argues in Roll Call that Americans should be ready for Trump to challenge the two-term rule.
“Just because the Constitution currently prohibits Trump from running again doesn’t mean he won’t try,” Gonzales writes “Challenging norms is what Trump does, and that’s partly why Republicans love him.”
There’s a similar argument from James Romoser in Politico Magazine, who notes that Vladimir Putin in Russia and and Recep Tayyip Erdogan in Turkey both found ways around term limits, although the American system of checks and balances should be stronger. A separate idea is that Trump could, perhaps, run for vice president in 2028 and then be elevated to the presidency by a resignation.
‘One term… and then I’m gonna leave’
While he likes to tease the idea of a third term right now, there have been times when he rejected it, such as in an interview with Time last April, long before his political comeback was complete.
“I’m going to serve one term, I’m gonna do a great job. We’re gonna have a very successful country again… And then I’m gonna leave,” he said.
