President Donald Trump said he’s “not joking” about trying to secure a third term, despite the constitutional prohibition against staying in the White House after his term ends on January 20, 2029.
“There are methods which you could do it,” Trump said during an interview with NBC News.
Trump was thwarted when he engaged in a conspiracy to upend his defeat in the 2020 election, falsely claiming that the voting was rigged, submitting phony electors, and unleashing a violent terror attack in an effort to stop Congress from certifying the results.
However, it is difficult to know what he might do because, in many ways, he is a coward. He also tends to lie a lot and exhibits extreme ignorance.
The president’s latest fabrication—that he holds the highest approval ratings of any Republican in the last century—is as mathematically illiterate as it is historically ignorant.
George H.W. Bush, scarcely a year before voters rejected his reelection, soared to a 90 percent approval rating at the height of the Gulf War, a level of national unity Trump has never approached and never will.
Ronald Reagan, the so-called “Great Communicator,” peaked at 58 percent, while Dwight Eisenhower maintained steady popularity through two terms—neither of them needed to lie about their numbers, because their leadership spoke for itself.
Trump, by contrast, remains one of the most disliked presidents in history, his approval ratings perpetually mired in the 40s, a figure that will only plummet further when his reckless economic policies trigger another inflationary spiral.
While he boasts about egg prices as if they were some grand economic achievement, the reality is that market fluctuations have nothing to do with his administration’s actions—just as his push for dirt-cheap fossil fuels will have everything to do with accelerating climate disasters that future generations will pay for with their lives.
His first term was defined by catastrophic mismanagement, from the botched pandemic response that killed over a million Americans to the unchecked rise in gun violence that his lax firearms policies only encouraged.
Now, with his promise to pardon nearly 2,000 January 6th insurrectionists—domestic terrorists who tried to overthrow democracy—he has made it clear that lawlessness will be the defining feature of a second term.
The embarrassing blunder that ensued after his top national security team exchanged war plans in a group chat, with a reporter invited to the discussion, shows that his incompetence is threatening the nation.
And yet, for all his bluster about being the greatest Republican president in history, Trump faces an obstacle even his ego cannot overcome: the Constitution itself.
The 22nd Amendment, ratified after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four terms, explicitly bars any president from serving more than two—a safeguard against the kind of authoritarian overreach Trump so openly craves.
Some of his sycophants may whisper about repealing it, but even Republicans, for all their cowardice, will not rewrite the founding document just to indulge a man who cannot even tell the truth about his own unpopularity.
Utah Republican US Senator John Curtis rejected the idea of supporting Trump for a third term.
Asked on about it on Meet the Press, Curtis laughed and replied: “I wouldn’t have supported a third term for George Washington. That’s a no, yeah.”
Oklahoma US Senator Markwayne Mullin also rejected an unconstitutional extension of Trump’s White House occupancy: “I’m not changing the Constitution, first of all, unless the American people chose to do that.”
The numbers do not lie, even if Trump does—and when history renders its final judgment, he will not be remembered as a beloved leader, but as a failed one.