‘Maybe we do it again’: Former White House strategist suggests Trump could run again, despite two-term limit

According to Steve Bannon, the third term’s the charm.

While delivering a speech at the New York Young Republican Club’s annual gala, former White House Chief Strategist Steve Bannon suggested that Donald Trump could serve an additional third term in office. The Constitution’s two-term limit for presidency doesn’t apply to Trump, he argues, because Trump won’t serve his presidential terms consecutively.

It’s reading of the Constitution that sounds like a loophole for animal athletes in a movie: “there’s nothing in the rulebook that says a dog can play soccer, but there’s nothing that says he can’t.” While Bannon may be all too willing to apply Air Bud logic his reading of the Constitution, the 22nd Amendment is clear.

Ratified in 1951, the 22nd Amendment stipulates that “no person shall be elected to the office of President more than twice.” The law came a decade after Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected to the presidency for the fourth consecutive time, and was made so such an unprecedented presidential reign could never occur again. Nowhere does it state that this rule fails to apply if a president does not serve their terms consecutively.

While the laws concerning presidential term limits is abundantly clear, Trump himself has suggested a willingness to bend them. In a meeting with House Republicans, Trump floated the idea of a third term saying “I suspect I won’t be running again, unless you do something.” While the statement was taken as a joke and prompted a laugh from the crowd, some believe that Trump’s intentions were serious. House Democrat Dan Goldman believes that Trump’s statements were “trial balloons” and that he was making them in order to put the idea of a third term into the heads of his supporters. It’s a political tactic known as the Overton Window, where a politician attempts to reframe an “unthinkable” idea as one that is instead “radical” but not totally outside the bounds of rational thought. A user of the technique will then slowly shift the goalposts of their argument, making a once outlandish statement appear commonplace due to repeated suggestion and downplaying. Goldman believes that Trump used similar Overton Window-tactics when he suggested the idea that he could pardon himself. Make the unthinkable thinkable again, and people won’t think twice.

While Trump may attempt to leverage ambiguity to his advantage, experts believe that when it comes to the Constitution, the framers were clear. When asked in a Vox interview if term-limit loopholes exist, Stanford University law professor Michael McConnell said “No. There are none.” According to McConnell, this will be Donald Trump’s “last run for president.”

It is possible that the 22nd Amendment could be rolled back, but it would be exceedingly difficult to do so. The repeal would have to be approved by a two thirds majority from both the House and the Senate, and then three fourths of the states themselves would have to agree. If Trump’s narrow margin of victory over Kamala Harris is to be considered, he would certainly struggle with state approval alone, on top of the ferocious pushback he would face from Democratic lawmakers in the legislative branch. Despite his tacit efforts to rewrite it, the American Constitution was written with people like Donald Trump in mind – to protect Americans from would-be tyrants.