‘They say I can’t run for president’: Trump suggests he could run for a third term for the third time now

For the third time in not that long, President Donald Trump has made a joke about running for a third term. He’s not even a month into his second term, and he’s already talking about it. Is this something we should be concerned about? Probably.

There’s even been a joint resolution introduced by Tennessee Representative Andy Ogles to let him stay in office past 2028. You know how sometimes things seem preposterous and then you hear about them again and again and they seem normal? This is what this whole “third term” thing is starting to feel like. It always starts as a side comment or as something presented playfully, then all of a sudden it’s this mainstream idea.

This is what Trump is doing. He was speaking at the National Prayer Breakfast recently, and he played around with the idea some more. “They say,” he remarked, with an emphasis on the second word, “‘I can’t run again.’ That’s the expression.”

He clearly knows what he’s doing, because then he said it changed from “can’t” to “I don’t think you can. Ohh.” He starts to laugh and the audience laughs along with him. He explains that he wants to be “with you regardless” and that it’s an “honor” to be at the breakfast. He then quips that he’s met “very nice” democrats there.

To be clear, as it stands right now, there is no possible way for Trump to stay in office for a third term. There are quite a few obstacles for that to happen. Firstly, there is the constitutional boundaries. Let’s start with Amendment 22, affectionately known as “Term Limits for the Presidency.”

Amendment 22 was ratified in February of 1951, so it’s been around for quite a while. You can read the exact verbiage here, but it basically and very clearly states that no person can can be elected to the presidency more than twice. Or, if someone was president for two years or more in the case of a president being removed, they can only be elected once.

To make that point more clear: let’s say Trump is removed from office and Vice President J.D. Vance assumes the role of president. Should he stay in office more than two years, then Vance can only get elected once.

The reason we have this amendment is because of the thirty-second President Franklin D. Roosevelt. He was elected in 1932 in response to the Great Depression and served two full terms. He was a beloved man, and when he ran again in 1940, he won. He was re-elected in 1944 and then died in office in 1945.

This was right after World War II, so congress was afraid of what’s called executive overreach, or the president being able to abuse his power. Sound familiar? The House of Representatives proposed Joint Resolution 27 in 1947, and it took four years (including working its way through the Senate) for it to be ratified.

What would it take to overturn Amendment 22? A lot. There would need to be a two-thirds majority vote in both the House and the Senate, and then ratification by three-fourths of states. Since there are 50 states, that would be 38. The thing is, Trump doesn’t really do things the normal way.