President Donald Trump keeps “joking” about running for a third term, and his allies are floating ways to make it happen—but Americans aren’t on board. New polling finds that not only do most Americans think he will actually try for a third term, but also a strong majority doesn’t think he should be allowed to.
When the polling firm YouGov asked whether Americans thought Trump would “attempt to serve a third term as president,” 52% said he “definitely” or “probably” would. And when the firm asked if Americans thought he should be permitted to do ita resounding 63% said he “probably” or “definitely” should not.
However, only 24% thought he should be allowed to serve a third term. Not even a majority of Republicans thought he should be permitted to.
Trump has hinted at subverting the law and staying in the White House past 2028. And his “jokes” about serving a third term are getting more frequent.
“Should I run again? You tell me,” Trump asked guests at a Black History Month event at the White House on Thursday. “There’s your controversy right there.”
In January, he mentioned it twice.
“It will be the greatest honor of my life to serve, not once but twice or three times or four times,” Trump said at a Las Vegas rally on Jan. 25, making a joke that the comment would make news. “No, it will be to serve twice. For the next four years, I will not rest.”
“Am I allowed to run again?” Trump said on Jan. 27 at a meeting with House GOP members in Florida.
Then, in February, he mentioned it at the National Prayer Breakfast in Washington, D.C.
“[T]hey say I can’t run again. That’s the expression. ‘Sir.’ And somebody said, ‘I don’t think you can.’ Ooh!” Trump said to the audience, laughing.
Trump would be the first president to stay in office for a third term since the ratification of the 22nd Amendment, in 1951.
“I don’t think he believes in democratic institutions,” Richard Gordon, a political strategist and the founder of Gordon Strategic Advisors, told Daily Kos. “There is just a complete lack of desire to see American norms and to see our democracy flourish the way his predecessors did. They put the country before themselves. There’s always politics, I get that, but they have always said that what is more important is what is good for the country, and they’ll take the political hit when they have to.”
Trump? It doesn’t seem as apparent.
As Daily Kos reported earlier this month, several different arrangements could be made for him to serve a third term. However, the legal pathways are nearly impossible.
The primary path is for Trump and his allies to generate a movement to overturn the 22nd Amendmentwhich 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.”
To overturn a constitutional amendment, a second one needs to be passed. Doing that is no easy task. The main route begins with two-thirds of both the House and Senate to approve an amendment, and Republicans simply don’t have the votes. For instance, given the current Senate mate, 14 Democratic senators would have to vote in favor.
But even if that somehow happened, the amendment would need to be ratified by three-fourths of state legislatures—and there are simply not 38 red states. It would require states as blue as New Jersey and Oregon to sign on.
The secondary route of passing a new amendment requires two-thirds of states to call on Congress for a constitutional convention. So far, there has been only one federal constitutional convention in American history, which took place in 1787.
Even in the extremely unlikely event that everything swung for Trump, adopting a new amendment could still take years. And Trump will be 82 at the end of his second term, making him the oldest president in American history.
The second legal-ish pathway for Trump is to run for president again and dare the conservative Supreme Court to tell him he can’t. If the court signs off on him serving a third term, then there’s no legal recourse to challenge it.
Beyond the confines of the law, Trump could simply refuse to leave office. If that proved successful, it would be the end of American democracy.
What does the GOP think?
Many in the Republican Party are dismissing Trump’s comments—for now.
“It was a joke, and people need to take it as a joke,” Sen. Markwayne Mullin, Republican of Oklahoma, recently told NBC News. “The president is a very interesting guy that you can find extreme humor when you sit down to visit with him. At the same time, he can be deadly serious. That’s why I call him my friend.”
However, Mullin doesn’t represent everyone in the party.
Republican Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee proposed an amendment on Jan. 23 to “revise the limitations” of the 22nd Amendment. “This amendment would allow President Trump to serve three terms, ensuring that we can sustain the bold leadership our nation so desperately needs,” Ogles said.
But this push requires Trump to be on board—and there are a few unsettling signs that he is. Beyond his repeated “jokes,” Trump has refused to endorse JD Vance as his successor. On Feb. 19, Trump called himself “king” in a post on his Truth Social platform, and promoted a fake image of himself wearing a crown. He’s also using an organization of disputed legalitythe so-called Department of Government Efficiency, to fire federal workers and dissolve agencies.
As a result, protests have surfaced across the country.
“Would the public rise up in opposition? You can guess they probably would. Would there be people who defend him? I think there probably would,” Gordon told Daily Kos. “It would obviously be a horrific situation for the country.”
Meanwhile, diehards who support a third Trump term are showing up too.
The recent Conservative Political Action Conference saw a sign displayed that said, “For Trump 2028 … And Beyond!”
The sign was the product of the Third Term Project, a group calling itself a “think-tank.” It proposes that one way Trump can hold onto power is to run as vice president on the same ticket as his son Donald Trump Jr. The idea is that, after winning the election, Don Jr. would “gracefully” resign “on Jan. 21, 2028 after securing victory,” as the group writes on its website.
Exhibiting their keen understanding of elections, the group gets the date wrong here. The winner of the 2028 presidential election would be inaugurated on Jan. 20, 2029not 2028. Jan. 21, 2028, is 291 days before the next presidential election will take place.
“This plan while unorthodox would show that MAGA cannot be stopped by any procedural rule,” the group wrote on their website. It also apparently can’t be stopped by the Gregorian calendar.
Whether it’s through constitutional amendments, a partisan Supreme Courtor outright defiance of the Constitution, Trump’s autocratic ambitions seem far from over. Trump may be “joking” about a third term, but many of his supporters are dead serious about it.
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