Donald Trump has said he is “not joking” about wanting to serve a third term as US president.
The US Constitution says that “no person… shall be elected more than twice”, but some Trump supporters have suggested there could be ways around that.
Why is Trump talking about a third term?
Trump was asked in an interview with NBC about the possibility of seeking a third term and said “there are methods which you could do it”.
“I’m not joking… a lot of people want me to do it,” he added. “But, I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.”
Trump, who would be 82 at the end of his second term, was asked whether he would want to keep serving in “the toughest job in the country”.
“Well, I like working,” he replied.
These were not his first comments on the topic. In January, he told supporters that it would be “the greatest honour of my life to serve not once, but twice or three times or four times”. However, he then said this was a joke for the “fake news media”
What does the US Constitution say?
On the face of it, 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.
Trump’s Republican Party controls both chambers of Congress but does not have the majorities needed. Additionally, the Democratic Party controls 18 of the 50 state legislatures.
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