#third term project

Wajahat Ali:

Many of us in America are suffering from a failure of imagination because we assume that authoritarianism can’t happen in America. We believe that we are somehow special, and we’ll avoid the fate of so many countries, such as Hungary. The American Empire will remain strong, steadfast, and powerful even though every empire before us has fallen, usually corrupted and destroyed by its own hands. Our institutions, which have bent the knee to Trump, will somehow protect us from a right-wing takeover.

And yet, in 2025, a convicted criminal who incited a violent insurrection has returned to the Presidency, where he has pardoned 1,600 of his fellow MAGA redshirts and wants to compensate them for their traitorous actions. Trump is engaging in trade wars with our allies, threatening conflict with Greenland, openly musing about Canada becoming our 51st state, disappearing innocent immigrants to be tortured in an El Salvador prison, illegally freezing funds, dismantling government agencies without Congressional approval, bullying law firms and judges, cancelling the visas of students with foreign policy opinions he doesn’t like, and outsourcing his job to the world’s richest man who is now trying to buy Wisconsin’s Supreme Court after successfully buying the Presidency for $290 million.

None of this should happen in America, but it is happening. None of this is normal, but it has become normalized because Trump is an aspiring authoritarian propped up by the Republican Party and the country’s establishment that is utterly complicit in replacing our flawed democracy with a corrupt broligarchy. So, why is it unfathomable to imagine that Donald Trump will become President for a third time?

Over the weekend, Donald Trump told NBC News host Kristen Welker that he wants to stay in office beyond his Presidency even though the 22nd Amendment bars an individual from being elected for 3 terms. “Well, there are plans. There - not plans. There are methods - there are methods which you could do it, as you know,” he said. Trump was dead serious, unlike before when we were told he was allegedly joking. I was never fooled. I took him literally and seriously. I also said Trump wouldn’t leave peacefully in 2020 and that the GOP would only become more radicalized and violent during Biden’s presidency. People like me were called hysterical, reactionary, and told we were suffering from Trump Derangement Syndrome

On Monday, the White House Press Secretary confirmed Trump’s statement and told Fox, “Trump is right. People love the job this president is doing.” By the end of the week, you can expect the entirety of the right-wing media and the Republican machinery to fall in line.

Wajahat Ali has a solid piece on the reality of Felon 47 illegally seeking a third term. It would be a nightmare.

See Also:

Civil Discourse (Joyce Vance): Trump’s Third Term

Chuck Tanner and Devin Burghart at IREHR:

Far-right groups like the Third Term Project and Republicans for National Renewal are concocting a multitude of ways to keep Donald Trump in power. In April, the “official retail website” of the Trump Organization, the Trump Store, unveiled the latest version of its red MAGA hat, emblazoned with “TRUMP 2028.”[1] The hat is the latest nod to a blatantly un-Constitutional effort by the authoritarian-leaning President to seek a third term. The idea has been bandied about for some time by MAGA figures like Steve Bannon. While White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt coyly continues to hint at the possibility of a third-term effort, other far-right groups are actively pushing the cause. In the last few weeks, more than two dozen MAGA groups have either rebranded or formed with “2028” in their name.[2] Building on conspiracies of “stolen” elections and nefarious actors impeding the Trump agenda, far-right groups have concocted a multitude of schemes for Trump to stay in power. Let’s look at the various schemes and the groups behind them.

Scheme A: Amending the 22nd Amendment

The most popular scheme to keep Trump in power is a plan to amend the 22nd Amendment, allowing a president to serve three terms. The idea is the brainchild of Congressman Andy Ogles (R-TN). In January, he introduced a “House Joint Resolution to amend the Constitution of the United States to allow a President to be elected for up to but no more than three terms.” Ogles justified this action by citing Trump’s need for more time, “reversing our nation’s decay and restoring America to greatness.” Ogles’s examples of the regime’s first steps in this direction included Trump’s inhumane and unconstitutional attacks on immigrants and their due process rights, as well as the administration’s efforts to gut civil rights under the guise of having “broken the chains of DEI,” among other things.[3]

Far-right groups have started flocking to the Ogles effort. A recent Mother Jones article highlighted an effort to bring a Trump third term to fruition by the Third Term Project, a project led by Shane Trejo that emerged at last month’s CPAC convention. “Trump is the Caesar figure that America has needed.” Trejo declared. [...] Support for the Ogles effort also comes from the Republicans for National Renewal (RNR). This far-right nationalist group has featured speakers such as US Representatives Paul Gosar (R-AZ) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), as well as anti-Muslim bigot and white nationalism fan Laura Loomer. A link on the Third Term Project page titled “Grassroots Resolution” connects to a petition hosted by RNR that “Supports a constitutional amendment, such as the one introduced by Rep. Ogles, to modify presidential term limits to allow for up to three terms in office.”[8] [...]

Scheme B: The Presidential Switcheroo

In addition to pushing Ogles’s 22nd Amendment change scheme, the Third Term Project is promoting the plan to have Trump run as Vice President, then ascend to the presidency after the inauguration.[10] If getting Congress to amend the 22nd Amendment’s two-term limit doesn’t take off, another scheme involves finding a loophole. The text of the 22nd Amendment bars anyone from being “elected” to a third presidential term, but says nothing about a person becoming president for a third term by some other route, such as by being elected vice president and then ascending back to the presidency through the death, resignation, or removal of the person at the top of the ticket. However, a prior Amendment addresses the unconstitutionality of the president-vice president switcheroo. Passed nearly 150 years before the 22nd Amendment, the 12th Amendment states that no one “constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice President.” If Trump were ineligible to serve a third presidential term under the 22nd Amendment, they wouldn’t be eligible to become vice president under the 12th Amendment. [...]

Scheme C: An Article V Constitutional Convention

Suppose Congress fails to amend the 22nd Amendment, and the Supreme Court rules out the switcheroo scheme. In that case, far-right groups have been working for years on a backup plan to use the states to initiate a full-scale Constitutional Convention to rewrite the US Constitution to keep Trump in power. The Third Term Project also calls for an Article V Constitutional Convention, a gathering to amend the Constitution held by Congress when “two-thirds of both houses shall deem it necessary…or, on the application of the legislatures of two-thirds of the several states.”[11] [...]

Scheme D: Defy the Constitution

If the far right is unable to muster the votes for an Article V Convention, or a Congressional Amendment, or a Presidential switcheroo scheme, other ideas are percolating. There are likely new schemes to follow. Steve Bannon suggested in a recent interview that there are “four or five” options for a presidential third term that his group will be rolling out closer to the 2026 midterms.[28] Some far-rightists have decided that the corruption of judges and others in the “deep state” is just too deep, so it’s time to ignore the courts (and the Constitution). In the QAnon conspiracy world, some point to clues of Trump as “the Last President,” where he will maintain rule over the nation.[29] Tech NeoReactionaries, like Curtis Yarvin, see an opportunity to assert absolute executive power to move the country away from a Constitutional democratic republic to a Monarch/CEO system of control. Others, particularly in the paramilitary wing, continue to fantasize about a second Civil War if Trump is prohibited from running again.

Lisa Needham at Daily Kos:

The one thing that conservatives are excellent at is grabbing hold of the Overton Window and yanking it so hard to the right that we end up in the ditch.  But it’s not just right-wing politicians and activists who find ways to get their most unhinged and unacceptable ideas to the mainstream—some conservative attorneys and legal scholars are in on it, too, creating legal justifications for all of President Donald Trump’s blatantly unconstitutional moves.  The current project is to scrape up some historical and legal support for Trump’s increasing musings about serving a third term despite the 22nd Amendment clearly forbidding it.  But this is exactly what happened when Trump wanted to ignore the 14th Amendment and eliminate birthright citizenship, and when he wanted to ignore the Electoral College and stay in power after losing the 2020 presidential election. Since the effort to deform the 22nd Amendment to create a loophole for Trump to slide through in 2028 is relatively new, it doesn’t have as much fake support yet. Mostly, conservatives are stuck with a single Minnesota Law Review article by Professor Bruce Peabody, originally from 1999 and updated in 2016, that examines how a president could circumvent the 22nd Amendment’s bar on a third term.  To be scrupulously fair, this particular article predates Trump’s ambition to occupy the White House until death do us part, and it’s far more of a thought experiment than a political polemic. But it’s precisely those types of thought experiments that get laundered into conservative discourse as articles of faith.  It’s Peabody’s article, really, that launched the possibility for Trump to slide into a third term, thanks to a tortured and hyper-literal reading of the 22nd Amendment. 

The language of the 22nd Amendment forbids anyone from being “elected to the office of the president more than twice.” It does not, however, say that someone could not serve in the office more than twice, leading to complicated possibilities for Trump to remain in the White House. But this is nonsense. The 22nd Amendment was literally pushed by Republicans in the wake of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s three full terms and part of a fourth. There’s no credible way to say that what was really intended by the 22nd Amendment was to generally bar more than two terms—unless someone really, really wants a third term.  But now conservatives have Peabody’s hypothetical explanation of how to slither through loopholes in the Constitution to help them make their case. 

[...] Fortunately for Trump, there are other soulless ghouls with better credentials who were happy to step up. Kurt Lash, a professor at the University of Richmond School of Law, rushed out an incomplete 8-page draft in late February, and he fleshed that out to a tedious 92 pages late last month.  University of Minnesota Law School Professor Ilan Wurman and Georgetown University Professor Randy Barnett took a different route, penning an op-ed for The New York Times to help launder these hard-right ideas into the mainstream.  But both of their arguments boil down to the same thing: The phrase “subject to the jurisdiction thereof” in the 14th Amendment means that “allegiance” to the United States is required, and undocumented immigrants can’t show allegiance because they broke the law by entering improperly. Therefore, their U.S.-born children are not U.S. citizens.  Lash, Barnett, and Wurman might be dressing up their theories in fancier ways, but they’re following the same tawdry playbook that Eastman used after the 2020 election, when he and Wisconsin attorney Kenneth Chesebro arranged to submit slates of fake electors to vote for Trump in states won by Biden.  The flimsy legal and historical support was dissimilar from the 1960 scheme when Hawaii sent electors for both John F. Kennedy and Richard Nixon, which only happened because a statewide recount stretched past the date for electors to cast their votes. 

David Smith at The Guardian:

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.

[...] 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.

[...] 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.