US President Donald Trump on Sunday said that he is “not joking” about serving a third term.
Although he has repeatedly hinted at this over the past few months, this is the clearest indication yet that Trump is looking to breach the two-term limit for American Presidents that has been enshrined in the US Constitution for almost seven-and-a-half decades.
Trump, 78, said during an interview to NBC that “there are methods” to make a third term possible, but did not give details about what these may be.
After serving as US President from 2017 to 2021, Trump was re-elected last year. His current term will end in January 2029.
A constitutional limit
The 22nd Amendment of the US Constitution states: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice”. If a Vice President were to become President in the middle of her predecessor’s term, she can still serve two complete terms as President, provided she enters office with less than half of her predecessor’s term remaining.
The closest this came to happening was in 1968, when incumbent Lyndon B Johnson dropped out of the presidential race. Johnson served the last 14 months of John F Kennedy’s term following his assassination in 1963, before serving his own full term from 1965 to 1969.
The 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, was brought in after President Franklin D Roosevelt (FDR) won four consecutive presidential elections in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944. (He died in 1945, just months into his fourth term).
There were concerns surrounding the President “entrenching power in a kinglike manner,” Kimberly Wehle, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Baltimore, told The New York Times.
An even older tradition
The framers of the American Constitution mulled at length about term limits but ultimately decided against them. Three proposals to introduce term limits failed in Congress in 1803, 1824, and 1826. (The latter two passed in the Senate but died in the House).
Nonetheless, a powerful tradition of American Presidents serving only two terms emerged less than a decade after the Constitution came into effect.
“In 1796, President George Washington’s refusal to run for a third term ‘received such official sanction that it became an almost unwritten law, virtually as sacred as any provision of the Constitution’,” wrote historian Stephen W Stathis in his paper ‘The Twenty-Second Amendment: A Practical Remedy or Partisan Maneuver?’ published in Constitutional Commentary in 1990.
Washington was the first President of the United States, and the man who led the then 13 colonies to victory in the American Revolution. Such was the impact of his decision that no other US President served a third term till FDR in 1940, in the backdrop of World War II.
An amendment unlikely
The most obvious way for Trump to be able to run again involves amending the Constitution.
A constitutional amendment may be proposed by the Congress with a two-thirds majority vote in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. The Republicans currently hold 53 of 100 seats in the Senate, and 218 of 435 seats in the House — well short of the 67 and 290 votes needed for passing a constitutional amendment in the Senate and the House, respectively.
An amendment can also be proposed by a constitutional convention called for by two-thirds of the State legislatures, although this route has never been taken for the 27 amendments passed till date and is politically even more unlikely.
Lastly, a proposed amendment becomes part of the Constitution only after it is ratified by three-fourths of the States, that is, 38 of 50 states.
In the current political climate in the US, there is next to no chance that Trump will be able to push through with a constitutional amendment. He simply does not have the numbers to do so.
A potential loophole?
During the aforementioned interview, NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Trump if one potential avenue to a third term was having Vice President J D Vance run for the top job, and then “pass the baton” to him. “Well, that’s one,” Trump said.
This would require Vance to win the 2028 presidential election, with Trump as his running mate. Vance would subsequently have to resign as President. And since the Vice President is first in the presidential line of succession in the US, Trump would then be sworn in as the commander-in-chief.
Constitutional law experts, however, say that this is not the loophole that Trump believes it is.
Professor Derek Muller of University of Notre Dame told the Associated Press that according to the 12th Amendment, which was ratified in 1804, “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”
The 22nd amendment makes Trump ineligible to run for president in 2028, and the 12th amendment extends this ineligibility to him being Vice President. Getting around this would again require a constitutional amendment, which will be next to impossible to pass.
Muller said that there is no “one weird trick” to getting around presidential term limits.
It will be very difficult, if not impossible, for Trump to run for a third term. (Haiyun Jiang/The New York Times) 
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