Photo: Bonnie Cash/Bloomberg/Getty Images
For many Americans, the big political question is how much of this country as we have known it will be left when Donald Trump leaves the White House in 2029. In an apparent effort to troll Trump’s detractors, MAGA folk keep calling for a third Trump term. And the president himself keeps bringing it up. It has become something of a game for journalists to force Trump to come to grips with the constitutional barriers to a third term (most notably the 22d Amendment, which flatly rules it out). And when NBC News confronted him with that simple fact on Sunday, he rather mysteriously said “there are methods” whereby he could stay in office beyond the 2028 election.
To make it worse, Trump said of exploring a third term, “I’m not joking” — yet he would not further clarify his intentions. This could be Trumpian bluster, but then again, this is a president who appears to be deadly serious about almost-equally preposterous ideas like the military conquest of Greenland.
To be clear, there is no constitutional path to a Trump third term. The 22nd Amendment, enacted by a Republican Congress infuriated by Franklin Roosevelt’s four consecutive presidential-election victories, is categorical: No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice. This amendment wasn’t just a momentary act of partisan spite, either: It essentially codified a tradition set by George Washington, which lasted until the combined emergencies of the Great Depression, then an impending World War II gave FDR an opening to violate that tradition, not without great controversy. Presidents who even considered a third-term bid prior to Roosevelt (notably Ulysses Grant in 1880 and Woodrow Wilson in 1920) were met with considerable public hostility and accusations of dictatorial intentions.
There is no exception for presidents serving nonconsecutive terms, as Steve Bannon has fatuously suggested. The dodge most often discussed by Trump fans is a scheme whereby the incumbent would run for vice-president in 2028 with, say, J.D. Vance at the top of the ticket, who would quickly resign and let The Boss stay right there in the Oval Office. But this is very clearly banned by the 12th Amendment, which holds that No person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice-president of the United States. Sure, you can contrive some wild scenario where Trump would be elected House Speaker, then both the duly elected president and vice-president would resign to return him to power. But obviously, that would require a cult of personality beyond any precedent in America, or much of anywhere else other than clearly authoritarian regimes like Stalin’s USSR, Mao’s China, or Perón’s Argentina.
In theory, of course, the Constitution could be amended to allow Trump a third term, the presidency in perpetuity, or perhaps a title like “emperor of America, Canada, and Greenland.” But there is a reason the Constitution hasn’t been amended since 1992, when the very popular idea of barring members of Congress from voting themselves instant pay raises was added. There is no foreseeable situation where the two-thirds votes in both houses of Congress required to let Trump stick around would exist, unless the Democratic Party has somehow been banned. Even if that happened, three-fourths of the state legislatures would have to ratify it. Republicans are ten short of that number in legislatures they control.
In other words, the only way Trump can get around the various obstacles to another term would be through some extra-constitutional action that suspends all barriers to his power or disables the opposition to create a one-party state (say, via a Reichstag Fire situation where the Insurrection Act is invoked to ban non-GOP political parties). If that happens, little trifles like hallowed democratic institutions or even the express language of the U.S. Constitution would no longer matter.
