This time I’m not joking about a third term, says Donald Trump

Acting as JD Vance’s vice-president could be one route to taking back the White House after the 2028 election, despite the 22nd amendment of the US constitution.

Donald Trump takes the oath of office in Washington in January. Picture: AP

Donald Trump has insisted he is “not joking” about the possibility of serving a third term, in his clearest statement yet that he may seek to extend his presidency beyond the limit set by the US constitution.

“There are methods [by] which you could do it,” he told NBC News. When asked if JD Vance, the Vice-President, could run for office and then hand him the role instead, Mr Trump said: “That’s one [method]. But there are ­others too.”

The President said it was “far too early to think about” how he might remain in the White House after four years, but added: “A lot of people want me to do it. But I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know. It’s very early in the administration.”

Mr Trump spoke just over two months into a term in which he has assumed sweeping powers as President while enjoying a majority in congress along with six ­Republican-appointed judges in the Supreme Court out of a total of nine. He has issued a record 100 executive orders in his first 100 days in office.

A number of judges and state attorneys-general have accused him of executive overreach for sacking thousands of civil servants, scrapping agencies set up by congress and defying a judge’s order by sending more than 200 alleged gang members, without proving the allegation in court, on deportation flights to El Salvador.

Changing the two-term limit would require a two-thirds majority in both chambers of congress, the House and the Senate, which the Republican Party under Mr Trump does not have. It would then require ratification from three quarters of the states.

The limit was a norm of American politics rather than a rule until it was broken by Franklin D Roosevelt’s four consecutive terms in office. The limit was written in plain language into the constitution in 1951.

But the 22nd amendment does not bar a two-term president from serving as vice-president. Nor does it make clear if a vice-president with this pedigree could be elevated once more into office, for instance, if the sitting president were to stand down.

Mr Trump began quipping about dispensing with term limits during his first term. At a fundraiser in Florida in 2018, he noted that President Xi Jinping was “now president for life” after the Chinese Communist Party removed a two-term limit. “I think it’s great. Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot,” he added to cheers.

But later that year, when Fox News presenter Chris Wallace asked him if he was considering attempting to amend the constitution, he ­denied it. “I think the eight-year limit is a good thing, not a bad thing,” he said.

In the wake of Mr Trump’s impeachment by the House of Representatives in 2019, his supporters began to claim, falsely, that this permitted him to seek a third term. The following summer, Mr Trump himself claimed that the FBI had “spied” on his 2016 campaign. “We are going to win four more years,” he said. “And then after that, we’ll go for another four years because they spied on my campaign. We should get a redo of four years.”

When he was re-elected last year, some of his supporters suggested that he would return to the White House with a freer hand, thanks to the two-term limit, released from the pressure of needing to seek the approval of the electorate once again.

In January, however, he told supporters that it would be “the greatest honour of my life to serve not once, but twice or three times or four times”. He then said this was merely an effort to provide “headlines for the fake news”, adding that the honour would be “to serve twice”. In congress that month, Mike Lee, a Republican senator and a senior member of the judiciary committee, said he could not see a plausible way for Mr Trump to ­secure a constitutional amendment.

Andy Ogles, a Tennessee congressman and a staunch Trump ally, whose recent proposals have included a bill to allow Mr Trump to buy Greenland, introduced a resolution in January for an amendment to keep the President in office for a third term.

In a video posted on X last week, he insisted that his suggested amendment, which applies only to presidents who do not serve two consecutive terms, was carefully tailored to Mr Trump.

“What you have here is a ­moment in time that comes along once in a century,” he said. It would still require ratification by two thirds of the states, he added. “It’s not a coronation.”

Some critics regard Mr Trump’s comments, and the support of allies such as Mr Ogles and Mr Trump’s former strategist Steve Bannon, as the first efforts to shift the Republican consensus on the proposal.

“Soon the entire Republican Party will be on this page,” the comedian Bill Maher said on Friday. “Presidents get two terms, not three, no matter how wonderful you think they are. It’s written in black and white in the constitution. Guys, you know this is wrong. You know in your heart that this is the moment when Rome stops being a republic.”

The Times