President Donald Trump is “not joking” about seeking a third term in the Oval Office, he told NBC News Sunday morning.
“There are methods which you could do it,” Trump said in a phone interview from Mar-a-Lago. One of those methods, he said, is having Vice President JD Vance run for president with Trump as his vice president. Vance would resign to allow Trump to regain the presidency.
“I have had more people ask me to have a third term, which in a way is a fourth term because the other election, the 2020 election was totally rigged,” Trump later elaborated to reporters on Air Force One.
But the president doesn’t “want to talk about a third term now because no matter how you look at it, we’ve got a long time to go.”
It remains unclear how serious Trump is about pursuing an unorthodox path to extending his time in the Oval Office.
The 22nd Amendment says “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” If 40-year-old Vance ran for president and resigned in favor of Trump, the now-78-year-old president would not have to be elected a third time.
Conservative Political Action Conference attendees overwhelmingly want Vance to be the 2028 Republican presidential nominee, according to CPAC’s annual straw poll. Vance was the choice of 61% of CPAC attendees.
