President Donald Trump just started his second term, his last authorized by the American Constitution. But he has already started talking about serving a third.
“There are methods you can do,” Trump insisted at NBC News in a telephone interview on Sunday.
This follows Trump months which makes the jokes of about a third term, despite the clear constitutional ban. “Am I allowed to run again?” Trump joked during a republican retirement from the house in Florida in January. Only a week after winning the election last fall, Trump suggested during a meeting with the Républicains in the House that he might want to stay after the end of his second term.
Trump’s reflections often trigger an alarm among his detractors even when they are legally impossible, since he tried without success to reverse his electoral loss in 2020 and has since forgiven supporters who violently attacked the American Capitol on January 6, 2021.
But Trump, who will be 82 years old at the end of his mandate, also said that it would be his last mandate. Trying for another would also categorically violate the Constitution. The current gambit is more like a qualified president to convince his party and the public that he could still be in power in four years.
Here are some questions and answers related to Trump’s occasional comments on a third term:
What does the Constitution say?
“No one will be elected to the president’s office more than twice,” the 22nd amendment begins, adopted after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected four times in a row. He was elected for the last time in 1944.
It is a fairly simple prohibition to serve more than two mandates. Some Trump supporters argue that the language is supposed to apply only in two consecutive terms because the terms of Roosevelt were consecutive, but in particular this is not what the amendment says.
Others argue that because the ban is simply “elected” more than twice, Trump could arise as vice-president of the next president and, if the ticket won, could simply replace this person if he resigns, a possibility that the president himself floated on Sunday.
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To put it slightly, it would be a fairly complex plan to make, largely because Trump would be 82 years old in the next elections, a year more than former President Joe Biden in last year’s campaign. In addition, the Constitution says that only people qualified to be presidents can be vice-president, which seems to prevent Trump from continuing the program.
At least one republican in the congress has been daring enough to propose a constitutional amendment that would allow Trump to request another mandate. He has no chance of going nowhere, given the high bar of the modification of the constitution and has not yet moved in the first months of the new congress.
Even assuming that Trump would try another race, a combination of electoral officials and courts would practically guarantee that he remained away from the ballot.
State representatives have long kept potential candidates for presidential ballots if they did not meet the fundamental constitutional criteria, as being an American citizen of natural origin or being at least 35 years old. They would do the same with someone who clearly violated the limit of presidential conditions.
A version of it took place in 2023, when a few states tried to keep Trump outside the ballot because they found that he had violated the ban on the 14th amendment to managers who engaged in the insurrection. The United States Supreme Court canceled these decisions because no one had ever used the insurrection clause on a presidential candidate before and there were a lot of legal issues on its implementation.
There would be no similar questions about the meaning of the 22nd amendment, said Derek Muller, professor at Notre Dame Law School.
“You would not have the factual differences, so it would be much wider,” said Muller about the number of states holding Trump on their ballots. “I am not convinced that the Supreme Court will turn around.”
So why is Trump doing this?
Trump has a long story of taunting his detractors to flex his power, but there could also be a strategic reason for him to maintain the discussion of the third mandate alive.
Trump is a president of Duck Lodieux in his last mandate. Because politicians who have been qualified will never be on the ballot for the same office, their political influence generally decreases quickly. The flirting of the third term is a way to try to convince people that Trump will be there in the future.
On Sunday, he told NBC that he was serious to consider the possibility: “I am not kidding,” he said.
Trump’s aggressive actions at the start of his new term show that he knows that his time is decreasing, said Muller.
“He governs as if he were a lame duck at the moment, without losing anything,” he said.
& Copy 2025 the Canadian press