President-elect Donald Trump does not appear to be interested in assuaging any concerns about a total pursuit of power.
Speaking before the House Republican conference on Wednesday, the 78-year-old, soon-to-be 47th president openly joked about running for a third term, telling the crowd that they could “figure something else out.”
“I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say he’s so good we got to figure something else out,” Trump said while laughing, according to the Associated Press’s Farnoush Amiri.
That would, of course, be a flagrant violation of the Constitution, which has stipulated since 1951—after President Franklin D. Roosevelt served a whopping four terms—that presidents cannot be elected for more than two terms. Previously, the two-term limit had been an unofficial precedent set by George Washington.
“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice,” states the 22nd Amendment. “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.”
But it’s not the first time that Trump has hinted he’d be open to skirting the ironclad rule. At a National Rifle Association convention earlier this year, Trump likened his future running the country to Roosevelt’s tenure.
“You know, FDR 16 years—almost 16 years—he was four terms. I don’t know, are we going to be considered three-term? Or two-term?” Trump said, allowing some people in the gun-loving crowd to cheer “three” in response, according to Politico.
Trump also floated the idea on the campaign trail in 2020, before he lost to President Joe Biden, bizarrely claiming he was entitled to a “redo” of his first term due to an FBI counterintelligence investigation that had examined Russia’s efforts to thwart the 2016 election. (That investigation found that Trump interacted with individuals with direct ties to the Russian government, and that the foreign power had meddled in the U.S. election in an effort to aid Trump and hurt then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton.)
Luckily, the process of repealing or changing an amendment likely won’t change anytime soon, even with a Republican trifecta at the federal level, as it requires overwhelming public support. As outlined in Article V of the Constitution, any such change requires at least two-thirds of the Senate and the House to agree on the modification, with that change then requiring ratification by a minimum of three-quarters of states in the nation.
A second approach to repealing the term-limiting amendment could be via a Constitutional Convention, though two-thirds of states would need to support the motion to have one at all, and any proposed changes to an amendment would still require ratification by three-fourths of the states.
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