2 days ago
10
Donald Trump has said there are “methods” – if not “plans” – to circumvent the constitutional limit preventing US presidents from serving three terms.
In an interview aired Sunday on NBC, Trump was asked about his trying to stay in office beyond his second presidency, a specter he has repeatedly raised while sometimes claiming he is just joking.
Trump told host Kristen Welker “there are methods which you could do it” – and this time made it a point to say he was not joking.
“Well, there are plans,” Trump said to Welker. “There are – not plans. There are methods – there are methods which you could do it, as you know.”
Welker alluded to a purported loophole some Trump supporters have fantasized about finding in which he could be the running mate to his vice-president, JD Vance, or someone else in the 2028 election. The person to whom Trump would be the running mate in that scenario could then immediately resign after winning and being sworn in as president, letting Trump take over by succession.
Their argument would be that the constitution’s 22nd amendment only explicitly bans being “elected” to more than two presidential terms without saying anything about becoming the commander-in-chief on an additional occasion through succession.
Vance has not indicated he is interested in participating in such a plan. And an election law professor at Notre Dame, Derek Muller, told the Associated Press that the constitution’s 12th amendment says “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice-president of the United States.”
Muller said that indicates that if Trump is not eligible to run for president again because of the 22nd amendment, he is not eligible to run for the vice-presidency, either.
“I don’t think there’s any ‘one weird trick’ to getting around presidential term limits,” Muller said.
Nonetheless, Welker theorized that Vance could somehow “pass the baton” to Trump.
Trump replied, “Well, that’s one.”
“But there are others too. There are others.”
When pushed to detail those methods, Trump said, “No.”
Trump then said it was “far too early to think about” trying to defy the two presidential term limit in the constitution to stay in office and that he was “focused on the current”. But asked if being president a third time would be too much work, he said: “I like working.”
And asked if he was just joking, as he and his supporters like to say whenever he floats anti-constitutional ideas, he said: “No, no, I’m not joking. I’m not joking.”
Trump’s comments came after he previously likened himself to a “king” – the royal title without term limits – on social media.
In February, he prompted widespread outcry when he took to Truth Social following his executive order for New York City to rescind its congestion pricing program and wrote: “CONGESTION PRICING IS DEAD. Manhattan, and all of New York, is SAVED. LONG LIVE THE KING!”
The White House then proceeded to share Trump’s quote on social media, accompanied with a computer-generated image of the president grinning on a fake Time magazine cover while wearing a golden crown, behind him the skyline of New York City.
Meanwhile, the Republican US House member Andy Ogles of Tennessee introduced a resolution in January expressing support for amending the constitution into allowing a president to serve up to three terms – under the condition that they did not serve two consecutive terms.
Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Bill Clinton and George W Bush could not seek a third term under an amendment like the one posited by Ogles, which would stand virtually no chance of passing. Only Trump would be eligible for a third term because he won the presidency in 2016 and in November yet lost to Biden in 2020.
Nevertheless, not all members of the Trump-led Republican party are on board with the idea of changing the constitution to let the president stay in power beyond the end of his second term in early 2029. After Trump’s “King” comments in February, the Republican US senator Markwayne Mullin of Oklahoma said he would not back an unconstitutional third term under Trump.
“I’m not changing the constitution, first of all, unless the American people chose to do that,” Mullin told NBC.
To modify presidential term limits would require two-thirds approval from both the Senate and the House, as well as approval from three-quarters of the country’s state legislatures. Trump’s enablers do not have the numbers required in those various entities to easily get that approval democratically.
The 22nd amendment was ratified after Franklin D Roosevelt served two terms following his election in 1932 – and was then re-elected in 1940 and 1944 amid the second world war. He died as president in 1945, and the 22nd amendment was ratified in 1951.
