Here’s Why Trump Has Been Flirting With a Third Term
Trump cannot be president again. But he and his loyal followers have every reason for wanting to make people think he can.
Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with business leaders in Tokyo, Japan.
(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)Can Donald Trump legally run for a third term as president of the United States? No. Can Trump serve as president for a third term? No. Is there some untried or untested constitutional theory that could potentially allow Trump to serve again? No. Can he run for vice president? No. Can he run for Congress, get elected as speaker of the House, and serve as president after the president and vice president resign? Well, he can run for speaker but he’d be ineligible to assume the presidency through succession. Can Trump delay or cancel the 2028 federal elections and serve indefinitely? No. Is there any legal way Trump can be president again in 2029? No.
Will Trump still be the president in 2029? I don’t know. Because laws do not matter to dictators.
Convicted criminal Steve Bannon touched off the latest round of discussion regarding a potential third term for Trump when he told The Economist: “Well he’s going to get a third term. So, Trump ’28, Trump is going to be president in ’28 and people ought to just get accommodated with that.” When informed that the 22nd Amendment explicitly prevents Trump from running again, Bannon said: “There’s many different alternatives.… At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is.”
Again, there are no alternatives, much less “many,” to get around the 22nd Amendment. The language is clear. It reads, in pertinent part: “No person shall be elected to the office of the 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 to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”
Trumpian scholars have tried to zero in on the word “elected,” with the implication being that while Trump can’t be elected as President again, he could serve through some other means. That has led many, including Trump, to theorize that he could run for vice president and then succeed to the presidency. He can’t. The 12th Amendment explains this clearly: “But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”
After the vice president, the line of succession to the presidency is determined by Congress, not the Constitution. The current line was established by the Presidential Succession Act of 1947, and it places the speaker of the house as second in line to the presidency. Given that the 12th Amendment established that no person who is ineligible to be president can even run for VP, it would be legally and constitutionally incongruous for a person ineligible to be president to succeed to the presidency under the Succession Act. Making an end run around the Constitution through legislation is usually frowned upon by the Supreme Court.
Of course, all of that “law” presumes there are still people who care about it. Trump doesn’t. Steve Bannon doesn’t. And the Supreme Court cares about it only when it helps Republicans. If Trump wants to be president again, and all the other Republicans, including the ones on the Supreme Court, want him to be president again, and the military wants him to be president again, all the laws in the world will not stop him from being president again. Every republic in history that no longer exists failed when some guy in power decided he didn’t want to give up power. Ours will be no different. Our little experiment in democracy will end the way they all do: when a man who has access to more guns than any of the other guys decides he doesn’t want to go away.
The threshold question on Trump’s third term, then, is not “what laws prevent Trump from seeking a third term”—the question is, “does Trump want to end the republic to get a third term?” And the answer to that question appears to be… not really? Trump has been repeatedly asked about this during his trip to Asia this week, and his answers have been surprisingly reasonable. He said that he could run for vice president (again, he cannot), but that he doesn’t want to because it would be “too cute.” On Wednesday, Trump said it was “too bad” that he can’t run again, which seemed to acknowledge that he knows he cannot.
Of course, that’s what he said this week. Next week, he’ll be back to hawking Trump 2028 hats. The week after, he’ll be saying he has “no choice” but to run again. Six months from now, he’ll say he “hasn’t thought” about running again but “many people” are saying he should.
We’re going to be in this “will he, won’t he” phase for the rest of his term, notwithstanding the fact that the law is clear. Trump is an aging narcissist dictator. Those people don’t cede power willingly. One of the things these types of people fear most is irrelevance and obscurity, and Trump is nearly there already. He’s just a few years away from eating McDonald’s in his “executive chair” by himself while watching NCIS and wondering why nobody calls him anymore.
Beyond his own psychological makeup, there are political reasons that explain the footsy he’s been playing with another run. Trump is a lame-duck president. The mere thought of his all-caps Twitter/Truth Social posts have been terrorizing the country for a decade, but, as Maximus might say: The time for honoring himself will soon be at an end. He’s an 80-year-old man who can now see clearly the end of his public life and relevance. He’s detested and reviled by half of his own country, and he’s transactional enough to know that most of the people who “like” him are just kissing his ass for the boons of cruelty he provides. Soon, very soon (though it can’t be soon enough), nobody will care what he thinks or who he threatens, because he will be out of power, unable to return.
Unfortunately, there are other people who want Trump to be president for life: the evil apparatchiks around him who need the demented man nominally “in charge” to allow them to continue doing their awful work. Trump’s impending political irrelevance hurts them the most. It is not an accident that Bannon, not Trump, was the person to start off this round of dictatorial talk. Trump’s power is the last shred of relevance Bannon enjoys.
As Trump’s power wanes, so too does the power of all his henchmen. In a normal lame-duck administration, this is about the time when those powers behind the throne start looking for their next meal ticket, or start preparations to reenter civil society, usually with a hefty pay increase. But is that going to happen for Trump’s people? Is JD Vance promising power and a fresh supply of human plasma to chief Trump ghoul Stephen Miller? Does anybody have to pretend to like Lara Trump’s singing once Trump is gone? Is there a job Lindsey Halligan can get after her series of malicious and buffonish prosecutions? Fox News can’t hire all of them.
A lame-duck Trump means downballot Republicans don’t have to fear him. It means every Republican presidential hopeful starts clamoring for Trump’s base. It means fracture and division in the Republican Party. It means that all of the people stomping around like they own the place under the cover and protection Trump provides are suddenly exposed. It means Lindsey Graham has to start looking for a new daddy.
Keeping the specter and threat of a Trump third term alive keeps all these cowardly and complicit Republicans in line. The Republican Party is the Trump party now, and there’s nobody who really knows what happens to that party once Trump himself is gone. The only way for Republicans to delay that reckoning is to keep Trump in power, or threaten to do so, for as long as he’s alive. The people around Trump will be threatening a third Trump term for as long as other Republicans believe that threat is credible. It is their only way to hold on to power.
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“swipe left below to view more authors”Swipe →Is it a credible threat? Should other Republicans believe it? Should we all fear an eternal Trump presidency and his Thousand-Year Reich?
No. Legally no. It’s not even a serious proposition.
However, as we near All Hallow’s Eve and All Saint’s Day, I am reminded that sometimes believing a person has power gives them a form of power. If the entire society operates like witches are real, then real people are harmed even though witches do not exist.
The only way Trump can run for another term is if everybody acts like he can. The only way the threat of him running holds any power is if people are irrationally afraid that he might. We will collectively manifest a Trump third term if we do not hold fast to the reality of its impossibility.
Trump cannot legally be president again. Remember that when bad people with evil intentions try to scare you into thinking he can. Trump is not magic. He’s an old man wearing the costume of a president hoping to trick you into giving him what he wants.
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