Trump Reveals He’s Not Joking About Becoming a Dictator
Donald Trump upped the ante on his delusional threat about term limits.

Donald Trump is “not joking” about running for a third term.
In a Sunday morning phone call with NBC News’s Kristin Welker, the president insisted that he was very serious about potentially circumventing the Constitution in order to lead the country for another four years after his second term ends.
“I know you’re joking about this, but I’ve been talking to a lot of your allies. They say they’re very serious,” Welker said, referring to Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon. “He says he’s really seriously looking at potential plans that would allow you to serve a third term.”
Trump replied that he could seek another term on the basis of his popularity alone, claiming to have the “highest poll numbers of any Republican for the last 100 years,” though that’s blatantly untrue.
Welker then pressed if Trump had been presented with the possibility of staying in office, since he wasn’t ruling it out.
“Well, there are plans. There are—not plans,” Trump said. “There are, there are methods which you could do it, as you know.”
Welker said that one method she had heard discussed among Trump allies would be for Vice President JD Vance to run at the top of the ticket in 2028 with Trump as his number two, before passing the torch to Trump once they’d won.
“Well, that’s one. But there are others too. There are others,” Trump said.
“There are others? Can you tell me another?” Welker pressed.
“No,” Trump replied.
“OK. So, but, but, sir, I’m hearing—you don’t sound like you’re joking. I’ve heard you joke about this a number of times,” Welker said.
“No, no I’m not joking. I’m not joking,” the president said, adding that it’s “far too early” for him to discuss such a move.
But while speaking to reporters on Air Force One over the weekend, Trump again raised the idea that “people” were prompting him to run again.
“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 said. “I just don’t want the credit for the second because Biden was so bad, did such a bad job, and I think that’s one of the reasons that I’m popular.… I think we’ve had the best almost hundred days of any president.”
The seemingly far-fetched and unconstitutional idea would require the consent of most of the country—if Trump attempted to formally run for president again.
As outlined in Article 5 of the Constitution, any such change requires at least two-thirds of the Senate and the House to agree on the modification, with that change then requiring ratification by a minimum of three-quarters of states in the nation.
A second approach to repealing the term-limiting amendment could be via a Constitutional Convention, though two-thirds of states would need to support the motion to have one at all, and any proposed changes to an amendment would still require ratification by three-fourths of the states.
Trump has repeatedly pitched the idea that he could stay in office after 2028.
The MAGA leader would be 82 years old in 2028—the same age that President Joe Biden was when he left office—and that’s unlikely to play well with an American public that is increasingly tired of being led by the elderly.
Still, that hasn’t kept conservatives from trying to keep Trump in power. Republican lawmakers have already started to pave the way for the unconstitutional takeover. In January, Representative Andy Ogles filed a joint resolution to amend the Constitution’s Twenty-Second Amendment so that the executive branch leader could serve “for up to but no more than three terms.”