- Trump hasn’t ruled out trying to run a third term
- This would go against the constitution
- His second term finishes in January 2029
Donald Trump is reportedly after an unprecedented third term in the White House, even if he is being cagey about it right now.
“We have a long way to go before we can even think about that,” the President told reporters yesterday (30 March). His ambiguous answer means that he still hasn’t definitively ruled out trying to stick around.
He told some other reporters: “I’m not looking at that, but I’ll tell you I’ve had more people ask me to have a third term.”
Read more: Can Donald Trump run for president in 2028?
Elaborating on his answer, he said: “I don’t want to talk about a third term now because no matter how you look at it, we have a long time to go. We have almost four years to go. And that’s a long time.”
It’s not the first time he has commented on this possibility either. In January, he told supporters that it would be “the greatest honour of my life to serve not once, but twice or three times or four times”. However, he claimed this was a joke for the “fake news media”.
Could Trump even stay on for a third term?
The Constitution’s 22nd Amendment prohibits a President from staying in the White House for more than two four-year terms. Meanwhile, the 12th Amendment says: “No person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”
For his opponents, this is a terrifying prospect. It seems impossible on the surface, but it appears that there are loopholes.
Changing the Constitution requires a two-thirds vote in Congress or a constitutional convention — which 34 states need to request. However, this is unlikely, especially due to the congressional deadlock and the huge political divides in the country.
Trump also suggested that current Vice-President JD Vance could run for office and then hand the presidency to Trump if he wins.
Perhaps Trump’s age could be a barrier too – he will be 82 by the time his second term ends.
What else has been happening in US politics lately?
The big news from the last week was the Signal group chat incident.
The Atlantic’s Editor-in-Chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, claimed that he had received a message on the encrypted messaging app Signal from an account with the name ‘White House National Security Adviser Michael Waltz’.
As Goldberg explains in his article, the Trump group chat featured input from many high-up Washington officials. While unconfirmed, these are believed to have included Vice President JD Vance and Secretary of Defence Pete Hegseth.
Read more: Donald Trump Group Chat leak: Best Memes so far
It continued to lay out details of a military operation regarding strikes that took place in Yemen. Meanwhile, Goldberg was present in the message thread – with everyone presumably unaware of his presence.
Soon after the news broke, a journalist quizzed President Trump on the situation but he said it was the first time he’d heard about it. “I don’t know anything about it,” the President told reporters. “You’re telling me about it for the first time.”
Saturday Night Live parodied it in a sketch at the weekend starring guest host Mikey Madison. The cold open saw a politician get added to a group chat full of teenage girls.
