Trump can’t resist trolling the Left…
On Sunday, President Trump addressed speculation he could be angling to attempt to pursue another term in the White House despite being term-limited by the Constitution.
Trump has been floating the idea of blowing off term limits for years, and one Republican has already introduced an amendment to allow it. During an interview with NBC News anchor Kristen Welker over the weekend, President Trump joked that he would consider running for a “fourth term.”
On his way back from Mar-a-Lago Sunday, Trump emerged into the press cabin on Air Force One to take questions from reporters and was confronted about his latest remarks.
Read:
Q: You said you were not joking about possibly wanting a third term. Does that mean you’re not planning to leave office on January 20?
POTUS: “I’m not looking at that but I’ll tell you, I have had more people ask me to have a third term, which in a way is a fourth term because the other election, the 2020 election was totally rigged, so it’s actually sort of a fourth term. I just don’t want the credit for the second because Biden was so bad, he did such a bad job, and I think that’s one of the reasons that I’m popular, if you want to know the truth.
“I think I’m popular because we’ve done a great job. I think we’ve had the best hundred days of almost any president. Most people are saying that and it’s an honour, bringing back our country. We’re respected as a country again. We’re strongly respected and people are amazed.
“I was with some very important people today and they said they’ve never seen a turnaround of a country as fast as this. Even look at our border. We have nobody coming in and you can’t come into our country; you have to come in legally. We have nobody coming into our country. It’s almost shut down.”
Q: The constitution limits a president to two terms –
POTUS: “I don’t even want to talk about it. I’m just telling you I have had more people saying, please run again. We have a long way to go before we even think about that but I’ve had a lot of people.”
Q: Do you think that’s an appropriate precedent to set, even if it’s not you in that position?
POTUS: “I don’t even want to talk about a third term now because no matter how you look at it, you’ve got a long time to go. We have a long time. We have almost four years to go and that’s a long time but despite that so many people are saying you’ve got to run again. They love the job we’re doing. Most importantly they love the job we’re doing.”
Watch:
The US Constitution seems to rule out anyone having a third term. The 22nd Amendment states:
“No person shall be elected to the office of the president more than twice, and no person who has held the office of president, or acted as president, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected president shall be elected to the office of the president more than once.”
Changing the constitution would require a two-thirds approval from both the Senate and the House of Representatives, as well as approval from three-quarters of the country’s state-level governments.
However, some Trump supporters have argued there is a loophole in the Constitution, untested in court.
They argue that the 22nd Amendment only explicitly bans someone being “elected” to more than two presidential terms – and says nothing of “succession”.
Under this theory, Trump could be the vice-presidential running-mate to another candidate – perhaps his own vice-president, JD Vance – in the 2028 election.
If they win, the candidate could be sworn into the White House and then immediately resign – letting Trump take over by succession.
