Not even the leader of the House of Representatives, Mike Johnson, Trump’s most loyal ally on Capitol Hill, believes that the President will be able to circumvent the limits on presidential terms set out in the Constitution.
“It’s been a great journey, but I think the President knows, and he and I talked about it, about the constraints of the Constitution, as much as many Americans deplore it,” on Capitol Hill in late October.
Johnson’s constitutional assessment should not be expected to stop Trump from talking about a third term. However, if Trump did so, it would start to sound more like .
When President Johnson wanted to withdraw from the race in 1968, he said the following during a nationally televised speech:
“I will not seek, nor will I accept, my party’s nomination for another term as your President.”
Compare LBJ’s clear statement with Trump’s latest tease about a third term: “I would love to do it.”
“I haven’t thought much about it,” Trump told reporters last week. “We have very good people, as you know,” he said, referring to his potential successors, Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
“But”, , “I have the best poll numbers I’ve ever had”.
In fact, his approval rate is consistently below 50%. And although Johnson was within his rights to run again in 1968, Trump is expressly prohibited by the 22nd Amendment from running for a third term at the polls.
His response continued from there. He boasted about his own achievements and talked about the unstoppable team that Vance and Rubio, who were by his side, could form.
There’s one thing Trump says he won’t do
Trump dismissed a proposal that would circumvent the Constitution, saying it would be “very shrewd” for him to run for vice president and then return to the White House after the President-elect resigns.
“I don’t think people would like that because it’s very sly. It’s not — it wouldn’t be right,” he said, although he tried to reserve the legal right to do so for himself.
“It would be permissible to do that, but I wouldn’t do it,” he said.
Nobody wants to be a failure
CNN’s Aaron Blake wrote about the many reasons Trump won’t let this kind of talk die — among them, relevance and fear of becoming a failure.
These are important points, but the fact also remains that one of Trump’s most committed allies, the provocateur, continues to talk about the possibility of keeping Trump in office.
Bannon told Bloomberg that there is a plan in the works to do just that, although he declined to share details about that said plan.
Bannon was among those who helped promote the idea that Trump should remain in office in 2021 after losing the 2020 election, so he and Trump have a history of trying to move things forward that, at first glance, seem like they would.
That doesn’t seem to bother Bannon, who currently serves no official role in the White House.
“Trump will be President in 2028 and people just have to get used to that,” Bannon told Bloomberg.
However, the Trump administration has undertaken bold efforts to change the political system. Just look at the odds in favor of the Republicans ahead of next year’s midterm elections.
Constitutional barriers
Much has already been written about the improbability that gaps can be found in the 22nd Amendment, approved after the death of Franklin D. Roosevelt while in office, during his fourth term, and which prevents presidents with two terms served from being elected again.
The amendment says, very simply:
“No person may be elected to the office of 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 for which another person was elected President may be elected to the office of President more than once.”
The idea of electing Trump as vice president — besides being “very funny” — also clashes with , which includes this phrase:
“But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to the office of Vice President of the United States.”
Could the President AND Vice President resign to make way for a Trump 3.0 administration? This sounds like a plot straight out of Russia, where President Vladimir Putin circumvented constitutional term limits by having a trusted deputy, Dmitry Medvedev, serve in his place for one term. Russian law was , which in theory allows Putin to remain in power until the 2030s.
Trump would have a more difficult time amending the 22nd Amendment, which would require approval from three-quarters of US states, something that seems impossible in the current political climate.
Trump is already the oldest President-elect and will be 82 when his second term ends in January 2029. In the same appearance on Air Force One in which he did not rule out a third term, he also told reporters that he had recently undergone cognitive testing at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. Without sharing any further details, he said, however, that he is in excellent health.
Questions about the health of a man approaching 80 will only increase in the coming years.
The SCOTUS Factor
CNN senior political analyst Scott Jennings told CNN reporter Abby Phillip last week that Republicans would largely oppose an attempt by Trump to circumvent the Constitution and remain in power.
So, according to Jennings, we should ignore all those 2028 hats Trump has been showing off.
“He is provoking his opponents and he knows how crazy it drives them when he does these types of things,” says the CNN commentator.
In this sense, Trump was evasive when a reporter asked, given his “very intelligent” rejection of the idea of running for vice president, whether he was thereby ruling out a third term.
“I’m not ruling it out? You’ll have to tell me,” Trump responded.
As long as people like Bannon are talking seriously about a “plan” and as long as Trump continues to provoke, talk of a third term should be taken very seriously by everyone else.
If Trump were to somehow attempt to remain in office, it would undoubtedly reach the Supreme Court (SCOTUS). One of the three judges he appointed, , agreed with the clear and obvious interpretation that the 22nd Amendment prohibits a third term for anyone.
“That’s what the amendment says,” he said in an interview with Fox News earlier this year.
This article has been updated with new information.
