It is noon on 20 January 2029. In the biting cold of Washington DC, thousands of people are gathered on the national mall to witness the swearing in of a new US president or, more accurately, an old US president: Donald Trump, aged 82, starting his third term in office.
The scene is the realm of fantasy or, for millions of Americans, the stuff of nightmares. But in the president’s own mind it is apparently not so far-fetched at all. Last weekend he told an interviewer that he is “not joking” about another run and there are “methods” to circumvent the constitution, which limits presidents to two terms.
For longtime Trump watchers it smacked of a familiar playbook of the American right and the Maga movement. Float a trial balloon, no matter how wacky or extreme. Let far-right media figures such as Steve Bannon make the case it’s not so outlandish because, after all, Democrats are worse. Stand by as Republicans in Congress avoid then equivocate then actively endorse. Watch a fringe idea slowly but surely normalised.
“One of the most important lessons of the last decade is the way that ideas have migrated from the fever swamp into the mainstream,” said Charlie Sykes, a conservative author and broadcaster. “How Steve Bannon will say some crazy thing only to see it become Republican orthodoxy a few years later. We’ve seen that migration of ideas that seem absurd and are perhaps dismissed but develop a constituency.”
This one is a long shot. The constitution’s 22nd amendment, ratified in 1951, clearly states: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Legal experts and constitutional scholars firmly reject any credible legal basis for a third term.
Yet for months Trump, who began his first term in 2017 and his second in 2025, has been testing the water by suggesting that he could run again anyway. Initially treated by some as jokes or political manoeuvering, the comments have recently moved beyond veiled suggestions to become more explicit.
Asked whether he wanted another term, Trump told NBC News: “I like working. I’m not joking. But I’m not – it is far too early to think about it.” Pressed on whether he has seen plans to enable him to seek a third term, the president replied: “There are methods which you could do it.”
None of these “methods” is straightforward. Trump could try to whip up political support to repeal the 22nd amendment. But the procedural and political difficulties of amending the constitution make this extremely unlikely. Democratic-led states could also refuse to put Trump on the ballot.
Wendy Schiller, a political science professor at Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island: “The technical hurdle is very high. Given the political configuration now, and the control of state legislatures now, it would be impossible not only to repeal the 22nd amendment but to get him on the ballot in all 50 states.”
Some argue that a constitutional loophole allows JD Vance to run for president with Trump as vice-president. Once elected, Vance would hand over power, much as Russia’s Dmitry Medvedev handed back the keys to the Kremlin to Vladimir Putin. But experts say this would violate the 12th amendment’s requirement that the vice-president be constitutionally eligible for president.
Alternatively and most simply, Trump could run for president again and gamble that the supreme court, which contains six conservatives including three Trump appointees, would not stop him. Time and again over the past decade, he has crashed through barriers through brute willpower.
None of it seems likely, but then nor did a reality TV star with no political or military experience winning election, nor did the instigator of the January 6 insurrection maintaining his grip on the Republican party, and nor did a man with 34 felony counts of falsified business records returning to the White House.
Sykes, the author of How the Right Lost Its Mind, commented: “My instinct is to to regard it as a distraction but that’s a mistake because the opposition has suffered from a lack of imagination on occasion of what Donald Trump is capable of doing and what he intends to do. Clearly he’s putting this out to soften the ground.”
Once unthinkable ideas have a habit of becoming very unthinkable in the Trump era. In the immediate aftermath of the US Capitol riot, Republican leaders moved to distance themselves from Trump and his “big lie” of a stolen election. Senator Lindsey Graham declared: “All I can say is count me out, enough is enough.”
But Bannon and other rightwing influencers worked tirelessly to promote Trump’s false claims of voter fraud. Before long Republicans were rallying around Trump again, suggesting that he was right to raise concerns over election integrity and dismissing a congressional panel that investigated January 6 as a witch hunt. Last year a CNN poll found that 69% of Republicans sayJoe Biden’s win was not legitimate.
Sykes noted another recent example: presidential ally Elon Musk suggesting that federal judges who rule against the Trump administration be impeached. Now opinion polls suggest that a majority of Republican voters are in favour of the move.
Sykes added: “If Donald Trump keeps putting this idea out there, there’s no reason to believe that he can’t get Maga [the Make America great again movement] behind him and then the question is whether the courts would go along with it. What happens if the court says, no, you can’t serve another term, but enough states put him on the ballot anyway? Who’s going to stop him?”
Trump’s third-term talk may also be a strategy to maintain political relevance and influence, wrongfooting opponents by keeping them guessing. It prevents him from being seen as a “lame duck” president and keeps the spotlight on him rather than his potential successors.
The comments could also serve to deflect attention from other controversies. Perhaps it was no coincidence that Trump mused about a third term in the same week that his administration had been rocked by a scandal over senior officials accidentally inviting a journalist into a Signal group chat about military attack plans.
Some Republicans are downplaying Trump’s remarks as jokes or simply an effort to “get people talking”. The White House press secretary, Karoline Leavitt, stated: “It’s not really something we’re thinking about. He has four years. There’s a lot of work to do.”
But the issue is gaining traction on the right. Just three days after Trump was sworn in on 20 January, Republican representative Andy Ogles proposed a House of Representatives joint resolution to amend the constitution so that a president can serve up to three terms – provided that they did not serve two consecutive terms before running for a third (this would continue to bar Bill Clinton, George W Bush and Barack Obama from running again).
At this year’s Conservative Political Action Conference in Maryland, Bannon proclaimed, “We want Trump in 28,” and argued forcefully for a constitutional change. The case was also put by Third Term Project, a thinktank exploring presidential term limits, with a logo portraying Trump as Julius Caesar.
Rick Wilson, a co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump, has seen this movie before. “It starts out as ha-ha, Trump is trolling the libs, and then it’s well, Trump is trolling the libs but he’s got a good point. Well, he’s got a good point and the Democrats are so evil we should set aside any restraint to pursue this idea. Then it’s why aren’t you getting in line with this idea, every Republican?”
Wilson added: “That arc is a known pattern now with Trump. Remember January 6. Every Republican – almost – came out and condemned that the day it happened and the idea became less and less defensible the more we knew about Trump’s role in it. But they became less and less willing to speak the truth. They became less and less willing to to resist and so I think that pattern is real, it exists, it’s been visible to us for a long time.”
Democrats are moving to counter Trump’s remarks and Ogles’ proposed resolution. Congressman Dan Goldman has introduced resolutions reaffirming support for the 22nd amendment.
He told the MSNBC network: “I’ve unfortunately been spending enough time studying Donald Trump to know that he’s not a comedian. He doesn’t joke and he has a very set MO, which is to float a crazy idea, claim that he’s joking, have some sycophantic Republicans start to run with it, like in this case, Representative Ogles, and then all of a sudden it becomes normalized and socialised.”
The two-term standard began when America’s first president, George Washington, voluntarily stepped down. Four of the next six presidents won a second term but passed on a third. In 1940 Franklin Roosevelt became the only president to successfully win a third election, couching his decision as one of necessity, not ambition, during the second world war. Roosevelt won again in 1944 but died the following year.
Not long after, Congress began discussion of what became the 22nd amendment, limiting presidents to two elections, and ratified it in 1951. There has been occasional talk of repealing it since. Ronald Reagan, another two-term president, publicly supported repeal, telling an interviewer that he “wouldn’t do that for myself, but for presidents from here on”.
Trump, however, has shown no qualms about grabbing power for himself, claiming that the public demands it because he has the highest poll numbers of any Republican for the past 100 years. Asked this week about a hypothetical showdown with Obama in 2028, he replied: “I’d love that, boy, I’d love that.”
Some observers note that Trump’s approval rating is already on the slide. Elaine Kamarck, a senior fellow in governance studies at the Brookings Institution thinktank in Washington, insisted: “This is not a serious effort. This is an effort to make Donald Trump into the most powerful politician that ever happened. The guy is not God. He will fall to the normal rhythms of politics. He’ll lose the midterms in 2026 and then people will be sick of the guy.”
Others, however, warn that Trump has been written off to easily before. Joe Walsh, a former Republican congressman from Illinois, said: “This is no joke and no distraction. It needs to be taken seriously. Trump just saying, ‘Fuck it I’m running’ and daring people, the party, the media, the military, the courts, to stop him – I don’t know that he could be stopped.
“It’s been an utter failure of imagination to be prepared for how far this guy will go. People never thought January 6 will happen; we never thought a president would try to overthrow an election. A guy who would do that, if he wanted to, would try to do anything to stay in office and run again.”
