Trump 2028? That would be unconstitutional : NPR

Flying on Air Force One somewhere between Japan and South Korea, President Trump appeared to finally acknowledge a third term isn’t in the cards.

“I have my highest poll numbers that I’ve ever had,” Trump said wistfully. “And you know, based on what I read, I guess I’m not allowed to run. So we’ll see what happens.”

Trump’s job approval rating, as tracked by Gallup, is not in fact at a high point — though at 41% he isn’t at his lowest point, either.

Saying “we’ll see what happens,” is a standard Trump line that leaves his options open. Though, in this case, legal experts say there is no way around the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution.

It states: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

“There are many parts of the constitution that are unclear,” said Rick Hassen, who specializes in election law at the University of California, Los Angeles. “But the 22nd Amendment is quite clear: no more than two terms. And it was passed because there was a president who served more than two terms and the country thought that that was not good.”

But that hasn’t stopped Steve Bannon, an on-again off-again Trump ally and MAGA mastermind, from talking about a third Trump term as a certainty.

How Bannon stirred the pot

“Well, he’s going to get a third term,” Bannon said in a recent interview with The Economist. “Trump is going to be president in ’28 and people just ought to get accommodated with that.”

Asked about the Constitution, Bannon said, “There’s many different alternatives.”

In an April interview with Morning Edition host Steve Inskeep, Bannon gave slightly more detail.

“We’re working on some things that are well inside the Constitution … and I think people will agree there will be very smart work arounds,” Bannon said, before adding that talk of a third Trump term is “exploding liberals heads, exploding progressive’s heads that Trump’s going to be with them forever.”

It would be easy to chalk this up as wishful thinking or even just trolling from a professional provocateur trying to ingratiate himself to Trump. But the president himself has kept it going, too.

Monday on Air Force One, when asked about Bannon’s assertions about a third term, Trump said he would “love to do it” and again said it is “very terrible” to have such good numbers.

Asked if that meant he was “not ruling it out,” Trump said, “You have to tell me.”

Though he also suggested that Republicans have a strong bench of potential 2028 candidates and said a ticket featuring Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of State Marco Rubio would be unbeatable. He did bat down one of the possible loopholes floating around — that he could run for vice president and then return to office after the elected president steps aside.

“I think the people wouldn’t like that,” Trump said. “It’s too cute. It wouldn’t be right.”

But, just like Bannon, Trump leaves the option of somehow staying in office dangling out there.

What Congress has to say about that

Just outside the Oval Office, red campaign-style “Trump 2028” hats sit on a bookcase of merchandise the president shows off to visitors.

Last month, when Democratic leaders visited the White House to talk about averting a government shutdown, the hats appeared on the resolute desk mid-meeting.

“It was the strangest thing ever,” House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries told CNN afterward. “I just looked at the hat, looked at JD Vance, who was seated to my left and said, ‘Don’t you got a problem with this?’ And he said ‘no comment’ and that was the end of it.”

That is, until the White House tweeted out photos of the meeting with the hats looming large.

As Trump talked repeatedly about a third term this week, members of Congress were asked to weigh in, too. House Speaker Mike Johnson said Tuesday he didn’t see a path to a third Trump term because amending the Constitution takes a long time.

“I think the president knows, and he and I have talked about the constrictions of the Constitution,” said Johnson. “As much as so many of the American people lament that. The Trump 2028 cap is one of the most popular that’s ever been produced, and he has a good time with that, trolling the Democrats whose hair is on fire at that very prospect.”

In an interview with NPR’s Here and Now on Wednesday, Republican Sen. Ron Johnson of Wisconsin also said Trump was simply trolling.

Brendan Nyhan, a government professor at Dartmouth College, says it doesn’t really matter if at this moment the president is serious or not.

“We are probably going to hear about it for the next three years, because he enjoys it,” said Nyhan. “It gets the kind of reaction he wants and it serves his political purpose.”

Trump is both making liberal’s heads explode — as Bannon put it — and trying to delay becoming a lame duck president, whose power wanes as the campaign to replace him heats up.

Nyhan said the fact that anyone is talking about it is a symptom of what he calls an “authoritarian malaise” in the country.

“It’s profoundly destabilizing to call into question something as blatant as the 22nd Amendment, which explicitly rules out what Trump is ‘joking’ about,” said Nyhan, who leads Bright Line Watch, which monitors the status of American democracy. “We’ve seen again and again him joking about things that he means to encourage or at least seems to give tacit approval to.”

In his second term, Trump has massively expanded his executive power, as Republicans in Congress largely either cheer or shrug.

“Is it possible that he could try to suspend elections, suspend the Constitution, run for a third term,” said Rick Hassen, who leads UCLA’s Safeguarding Democracy Project.

“All of these things are possible, but that means we are no longer the American democracy that we’ve had, and then the country’s in real trouble. But if you’re asking about a legal path to a third term, it’s just not there.”

Plus, he asked slyly, would Trump really want to run for a third term against former President Barack Obama? (Trump says he would.)

NPR’s Saige Miller contributed to this report.