Donald Trump has reignited a long-running constitutional argument by claiming there are “methods” that could allow him to serve a third term as president, while allies outside the administration suggest a plan is being developed to test the limits of the Twenty-Second Amendment. In remarks published in late March, Trump told an interviewer he was not joking when he had previously floated the idea, saying there were avenues that might permit a return beyond the two elections the Constitution allows. The comments prompted a wave of legal rebuttals from scholars who say any “loophole” theory defeats both the letter and the purpose of the amendment ratified in 1951 after Franklin D. Roosevelt’s four election victories.
The claim resurfaced again this week after Steve Bannon, Trump’s former White House chief strategist and a prominent voice in the Make America Great Again movement, told The Economist that Trump would be back in 2028 and that supporters should “get accommodated with that,” adding, “There’s many different alternatives.” The remarks echoed a stream of social-media posts and partisan commentary asserting that a twice-elected president could lawfully maneuver back into office by means other than winning a third election. Bannon did not outline a specific legal pathway.
The text of the Twenty-Second Amendment bars any person from being “elected to the office of the President more than twice.” It also prevents someone 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” from being elected more than once. Because Trump won the 2016 and 2024 elections, any further candidacy would be foreclosed by the amendment’s plain language, according to mainstream constitutional analysis. The National Constitution Center has summarized the consensus view as straightforward: the amendment “clearly states” that a person twice elected to the presidency cannot run again.
Despite that clarity, two ideas recur whenever the possibility of a third term is broached. The first is that the amendment’s focus on being “elected” leaves open the possibility that a former two-time winner could serve again by succession—most commonly imagined as returning first as vice president or as Speaker of the House and then ascending if the presidency becomes vacant. The second is that Congress and the states could change the Constitution to raise the cap or carve out an exception. In practice, both routes face formidable legal and political obstacles. The succession notion collides with the Twelfth Amendment, which says “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President,” and with a long line of scholarship reading “constitutionally ineligible” to include anyone barred by the Twenty-Second Amendment. The amendment route would require two-thirds majorities in both chambers of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states—thresholds seldom reached and virtually unreachable on such a polarizing question.
Trump’s own legal and political circle has sent mixed signals about the viability of any gambit. In early April, Attorney General Pam Bondi, asked on Fox News about a third term, called it a “heavy lift,” a phrase that reinforced the public stance of mainstream lawyers who say the courts would almost certainly reject an attempt to game the limit through the vice presidency or an engineered succession. Independent fact-checking organizations have gone further, branding the “loophole” legal argument “implausible,” and stressing that such a reading would subvert the amendment’s intent to impose a hard ceiling on electoral paths back to the office.
A separate line of argument has focused on litigation strategy rather than doctrine, positing that a determined campaign could manufacture enough ambiguity to buy time, unleash competing suits in multiple jurisdictions, and force a Supreme Court showdown under intense political pressure. Analysts who canvassed that scenario noted that even proponents concede the hurdles are high: establishing standing, identifying a justiciable controversy before ballots are printed, and overcoming the plain text of the Twenty-Second Amendment. PolitiFact reported in March that while the word “elected” has given rise to theoretical debates about nonelectoral service, any real-world attempt to return by succession would collide with the Twelfth Amendment’s vice-presidential ineligibility clause and broader constitutional structure.
Republican allies in Congress have explored the alternative—changing the Constitution—though with little expectation of success. In January, Representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee introduced a joint resolution to amend the Twenty-Second Amendment to allow a person to be elected to the presidency three times, so long as the terms were not consecutive. The measure was tailored to enable a potential Trump run while excluding presidents who served two terms in a row, but constitutional amendments require bipartisan supermajorities and widespread state support that do not exist in the current climate. The proposal has not advanced beyond introduction.
The immediate spark for the present debate was a round of interviews in which Trump revisited a theme he has toyed with since his first reelection campaign. After the 2024 race, he told House Republicans, “I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we’ve got to figure something else out,’” a remark he later said was not a joke. In the March interview, he went further, saying there were “methods” that could allow a third term. CBS News and the Guardian both recorded the comments and the swift pushback they drew from scholars and good-government groups. The White House did not publish a written plan or legal memorandum spelling out any strategy.
The history against which the amendment was framed is central to the legal skepticism. Roosevelt’s four election victories before his death in 1945 prompted bipartisan concern that an entrenched incumbent could dominate the office, and the amendment was ratified by the states in 1951 to codify the two-term norm that had held from George Washington onward. The framers of the amendment wrote with an eye toward both continuity and corner cases: hence the two-year clause that prevents a vice president who serves most of a predecessor’s term from running twice more. Courts asked to reconcile the Twenty-Second and Twelfth Amendments would likely read them together, critics of the loophole theory say, to bar an end-run in which a twice-elected former president becomes vice president and then ascends. Fact-checking outlets that surveyed constitutional scholars in April reported broad consensus that the maneuver would not survive judicial review.
Supporters of the president’s suggestion often note that Grover Cleveland served nonconsecutive terms, arguing by analogy that nonconsecutive service demonstrates flexibility in executive tenure. Legal historians counter that Cleveland’s path—two elections separated by defeat—fits comfortably within the Twenty-Second Amendment’s text and that his example, if anything, reinforces the present constraint: the amendment was drafted precisely to permit a future Cleveland-style return once, but not to permit a third electoral win. They add that no modern court has been asked to bless an attempted vice-presidential end-run by a twice-elected president, and that litigation would draw in not only the amendments at issue but also the Presidential Succession Act and questions of democratic legitimacy that courts are reluctant to disturb.
Bannon’s comments have kept the issue in the headlines, amplifying speculation about a 2028 campaign and drawing statements from lawmakers who say they will resist any effort to circumvent the limit. A press release from Representative Dan Goldman, a New York Democrat, catalogued prior instances in which Trump publicly mused about a third term and accused the president of testing public tolerance for norm violations by repetition. Conservative media outlets sympathetic to Trump, meanwhile, have highlighted academic writing that parses the word “elected” and explores hypothetical succession pathways, though such papers typically emphasize that the theories are untested and would trigger immediate court challenges.
At stake is not only a textual debate but also the mechanics of election administration and judicial timing. Any attempt to place a twice-elected candidate on a presidential ballot in 2028 would be contested at the state level by litigants seeking to block certification under the Twenty-Second Amendment. Secretaries of state would face pressure to decide eligibility before printing ballots; courts would be asked for expedited rulings to avoid voter confusion; and the Supreme Court could be forced to resolve the issue under tight deadlines. Election-law specialists note that the litigation posture would likely resemble challenges brought under the Fourteenth Amendment during the 2024 cycle, with fractured timelines and uneven state rulings that would demand a final, nationwide answer from the justices. PolitiFact’s analysis concluded that even a maximalist reading of the word “elected” would be unlikely to open a clean path, because the vice-presidential route is foreclosed by the Twelfth Amendment and an attempted nonelectoral ascent would be subject to immediate injunctions.
The administration’s public communications have not advanced beyond Trump’s own remarks. The president has, at other moments, said he would not seek a third term, a denial that sits alongside the more recent assertion that “methods” exist. Media accounts have portrayed the ambiguity as a familiar rhetorical pattern, keeping attention on a boundary-testing idea without committing to a plan that could be judged on its legal merits. For now, the hard constraints remain the words ratified by the states in 1951 and the institutional resistance to rewriting them absent overwhelming consensus.
Efforts to sway that consensus through formal amendment face steep odds. Since 1789, thousands of constitutional amendments have been proposed and only 27 adopted, the most recent in 1992. The process requires two-thirds votes in both chambers of Congress or a convention called by two-thirds of state legislatures, and ratification by three-quarters of the states. The Ogles resolution, narrowly tailored to permit a nonconsecutive third election, underscores how any attempt to change the rule would be perceived—as a bespoke fix for one politician—complicating the already daunting task of assembling a national coalition. Even if such a measure cleared Congress, the ratification map would demand assent from states won by both parties, an unlikely alignment.
In the near term, the practical effect of the renewed talk is to prompt clarifying statements from legal authorities and to mobilize activists on both sides of the question. The National Constitution Center and nonpartisan fact-checking organizations have once again presented the core text and its historical context, while editorial pages across the spectrum have reminded readers that Roosevelt’s era produced a deliberately hard stop. CBS News reported that Trump “doubled down” on the suggestion in March, and the Guardian noted that he insisted he was not joking, but in neither case did the president or his aides offer a legal memorandum or court strategy. Without a concrete vehicle—such as a state ballot filing or a vice-presidential nomination—the argument remains theoretical.
The coming months will determine whether the theory moves from rhetoric to test case. Any step toward a third-term run—filing with the Federal Election Commission for 2028, seeking a vice-presidential slot, or signaling a planned House run tied to succession—would trigger immediate lawsuits, including from rival candidates and voter plaintiffs, designed to force an early ruling. Scholars expect courts to move swiftly if the dispute touches ballot access or the counting of electoral votes, with the Supreme Court likely to take jurisdiction to avoid a patchwork outcome. Until such a case exists, the formal legal status quo is unchanged: the Twenty-Second Amendment bars a third election to the presidency, and the Twelfth Amendment blocks a twice-elected president from using the vice presidency as a back door to the Oval Office. On the political calendar, that amounts to a hard stop in 2029, when the current term ends, unless the nation undertakes the rare, arduous task of changing the Constitution itself.
For supporters who take Bannon’s prediction at face value, the promise of “many different alternatives” may sound like a plan in motion. For lawyers who work in the field, it reads as a set of talking points that run headlong into the architecture of the post-Roosevelt presidency. The amendment was written to be simple, and courts are generally reluctant to make simple things complicated—particularly where the stakes are the basic rules of succession and the principle that no individual, however popular, can remain in the most powerful office in the country beyond the limit the people set. However the politics unfold, the legal terrain has been mapped for decades, and it points to the same conclusion: under the Constitution as it exists today, Donald Trump cannot lawfully be elected to a third term, and efforts to recast that rule as a loophole are unlikely to survive first contact with a judge.