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Critics attack Trump notion of serving third term
Donald Trump’s repeated musings that there is scope for breaking with the US constitution’s explicit ban on running for a third term in office is attracting criticism from some in both parties.
Changing the constitution so that it no longer forbids a third term is a very high hurdle to leap over. You need a two-thirds majority vote in the US Congress or two-thirds of US states agreeing to convene a constitutional convention at which an amendment would be proposed, NBC reports. Then agreement from such a vote would need to be ratified by three-quarters of the states.
Trump talked about a possible third term before he was inaugurated and has brought it up at least twice more since he became the 47th president of the United States, in a return to the White House that has shaken the US government to its core.
Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat, posted on X about the possibility of Trump service again: “So, that’s actually not allowed…The Constitution isn’t optional, sir. This isn’t a reality show — it’s reality. Two terms, that’s it.”
Republican John Dean, from the Nixon era, talked of Trump trying an “end run”.
Key events
John Dean said that the debate around whether a US president can run for a third term is not new.
“It actually goes back to a Law Journal article in 1999 where a bunch of scholars got together and looked at the 22nd amendment and said: ‘You know, maybe a president cannot be re-elected twice but maybe he can serve [again] twice.’”
Dean said the scholars discussed the possibility of a president becoming a vice-presidential candidate after serving two terms and then when the nominee at the top of the ticket is elected president he could step aside and let his No 2 and former president take over to serve as president for a third time, using the succession statute.
“This is really obtuse, it’s pretty good scholarship, it’s been debated for a number of years. Hillary Clinton looked at it when she was nominated [in 2016 for the Democrats], thinking maybe her husband, the former president [Bill] should be her vice-president.
“Then she realized, ‘well, he’s not really eligible to become president in my reading and and most readings of the 22nd amendment’, so she precluded that. A lot of people thought [Barack] Obama should go for another term, he didn’t. He read the constitution and said: ‘I’m not for end runs.’”
Republican John Dean, former White House counsel to Richard Nixon as president, who was jailed for his involvement in the cover-up of Watergate and later testified to Congress as a witness for the investigation into the scandal, criticized Trump’s apparent aspiration for a third term, in an interview with CNN.
“He likes constitutional end-runs … and that’s what seems to be on his mind is how he can get around the very clear language of the 22nd amendment [to the US constitution], which precludes getting elected to more than two terms,” Dean said.
CNN asked, if there are ways to get around the law, constitutionally what could those be?
Dean said: “They would have to be written by the supreme court, that would redefine the constitution. I just describe it as a constitutional end run.”
An end run is an American football term for the ball-carrier running around the end of the defensive line in their attempt to reach the line to score a touchdown.
The key line from the 22nd amendment, forbidding anyone who has been elected president twice from being elected again. reads:
“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.”
The US Congress approved the amendment in 1947, and submitted it to the state legislatures, where it was then ratified in 1951.
Previous presidents had not had term limits. The first and third US presidents, George Washington and Thomas Jefferson, established the tradition, however, of opting not to run for re-election after serving two terms.
Franklin Roosevelt was elected for a third and fourth term, in 1940 and 1944, and his decisions heightened concerns about the presidency not being subject to term limits.
Critics attack Trump notion of serving third term
Donald Trump’s repeated musings that there is scope for breaking with the US constitution’s explicit ban on running for a third term in office is attracting criticism from some in both parties.
Changing the constitution so that it no longer forbids a third term is a very high hurdle to leap over. You need a two-thirds majority vote in the US Congress or two-thirds of US states agreeing to convene a constitutional convention at which an amendment would be proposed, NBC reports. Then agreement from such a vote would need to be ratified by three-quarters of the states.
Trump talked about a possible third term before he was inaugurated and has brought it up at least twice more since he became the 47th president of the United States, in a return to the White House that has shaken the US government to its core.
Texas congresswoman Jasmine Crockett, a Democrat, posted on X about the possibility of Trump service again: “So, that’s actually not allowed…The Constitution isn’t optional, sir. This isn’t a reality show — it’s reality. Two terms, that’s it.”
Republican John Dean, from the Nixon era, talked of Trump trying an “end run”.
In the Wisconsin supreme court race – seen as such an important contest that Elon Musk has been handing out $1m checks – can the abortion issue be a silver bullet for the Democrats in galvanizing their voters?
Trump approval ratings dip over tariffs
Immigration remains a strength for Donald Trump, but his handling of tariffs is getting more negative feedback, according to a poll from the Associated Press-NORC Center for Public Affairs Research.
About half of US adults approve of Trump’s approach to immigration, the survey shows, but only about four in 10 have a positive view of the way he’s handling the economy and trade negotiations.
The poll indicates that many Americans are still on board with Trump’s efforts to ramp up deportations and restrict immigration. But it also suggests that the Republican president’s threats to impose tariffs – which have been accompanied by tumbling consumer confidence and wild stock market swings – might be erasing his advantage on another issue that he made central to his winning 2024 campaign.
The economy was a drag on then president Joe Biden, who saw the share of Americans who approved of his handling of the economy fall to a low of roughly three in 10 in 2023. Trump drew considerable strength in November from voters who prioritized the economy, but just before he took office in January, an AP-NORC poll found that few Americans had high confidence that he’d make progress on lowering prices in his first year.
Views of Trump’s job performance overall are more negative than positive, the survey found. About four in 10 US adults approve of the way Trump is handling his job as president, and more than half disapprove.
Wall Street expected to join global sell-off
Wall Street is set to join the global sell-off when trading begins in around two hours.
Investors in New York are increasingly anxious about the tariffs which Donald Trump plans to announce on Wednesday.
Raffi Boyadjian, lead market analyst at XM, says:
Hopes that this week’s reciprocal tariffs would not be as harsh as feared were dashed over the weekend after US President Trump doubled down on his pursuit of using import levies to ‘make America great again’. With just a couple of days to go until the White House outlines the details of the reciprocal tariffs – the broadest set of restrictions yet to be unveiled by the Trump administration – there is a growing sense of panic in the markets about the scale and implications of the April 2 announcement.
Our business blog has more on how the markets are reacting.
Chance of US recession at 35%, says Goldman Sachs
Goldman Sachs has raised the probability of a US recession to 35% from 20% and said it expects more rate cuts by the Federal Reserve, as Trump’s tariffs roil the global economy and upend financial markets.
The brokerage also lowered its US GDP growth forecast for 2025 to 1.5% from 2.0% and projected three interest rate cuts each from the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank from its previous expectation of two each.
Trump said on Sunday his reciprocal tariffs, to be announced this week, would include all countries.
Associated Press interviewed Derek Muller, a professor of election law at Notre Dame, about Donald Trump’s comments on a third term, specifically in response to NBC’s Kristen Welker asking if JD Vance could be elected and then “pass the baton” to Trump (see earlier post).
Muller noted that the 12th amendment, which was ratified in 1804, says: “No person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”
Muller said that indicates that if Trump is not eligible to run for president again because of the 22nd amendment, he is not eligible to run for vice-president, either.
“I don’t think there’s any ‘one weird trick’ to getting around presidential term limits,” Muller said.
In addition, pursuing a third term would require extraordinary acquiescence by federal and state officials, not to mention the courts and voters themselves.
Muller suggested that Trump is talking about a third term for political reasons to “show as much strength as possible”.
“A lame-duck president like Donald Trump has every incentive in the world to make it seem like he’s not a lame duck,” he said.
Trump, who would be 82 at the end of his second term, was asked during the NBC interview whether he would want to keep serving in “the toughest job in the country” at that point.
“Well, I like working,” the president said.
Global stock markets fall ahead of Trump ‘Liberation Day’ tariffs
Global stock markets were a sea of red on Monday and investors fled to gold ahead of a wave of US tariffs this week that have fuelled recession fears.
Tokyo plunged more than 4%, leading losses across Asian and European markets, amid nerves Donald Trump’s latest tariff announcements due on his “Liberation Day” on Wednesday, Agence France-Presse reports.
Adding to fears, Trump said on Sunday that tariffs would include “all countries”, not just those with the largest trade imbalances with the US.
Automakers were hit particularly hard in the wake of Trump’s announcement that he would also impose 25% duties on imports of all vehicles and parts.
In Europe, Porsche, Volkswagen and Stellantis, which owns several brands including Jeep, Peugeot and Fiat, all dropped around 3%.
Toyota, the world’s biggest car-maker, plunged over 3%, along with Nissan and Mazda.
Gold, seen as a safe haven asset in times of uncertainty, hit a record high over $3,100 an ounce.
Putin ‘open’ to Trump call after comments
The Kremlin has said that Vladimir Putin was still “open” to speaking to Donald Trump after the US president said he was “very angry” with the Russian leader over little progress on a ceasefire in Ukraine.
Trump earlier criticised Putin as he pushes to end more than three years of conflict in Ukraine.
Trump told NBC he was “pissed off” at Putin for questioning Ukraine’s Volodymyr Zelenskyy’s credibility as someone to negotiate with.
“The president remains open to contact with President Trump,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters in a briefing call.
He said there was no phone call scheduled between the two leaders, but that one could be “organised promptly” if deemed “necessary”.
Warning of HIV resurgence amid Trump cuts
The federal government has cancelled dozens of grants to study how to prevent new HIV infections and expand access to care, decimating progress toward eliminating the epidemic in the United States, scientists say.
Over the last month, more than 300 research projects funded by the National Institutes of Health (NIH) have been terminated – 65 of them were specifically related to researching advancements in HIV care. Some scientists were notified about losing funding as recently as last Thursday. NIH, a division of the Department of Health and Human Services, is the largest funding source of medical research in the world, leaving many scientists scrambling to figure out how to continue their work.
“The loss of this research could very well result in a resurgence of HIV that becomes more generalized in this country,” said Julia Marcus, a professor at Harvard Medical School who recently had two of her grants cancelled.
You can read more here
In yesterday’s interview, NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Donald Trump if one potential avenue to a third term was having Vice-president JD Vance run for the top job and “then pass the baton to you”.
“Well, that’s one,” Trump responded. “But there are others too. There are others.”
“Can you tell me another?” Welker asked.
“No,” Trump replied.
We are getting some reaction to Trump’s comments about a possible third term.
Representative Daniel Goldman, a New York Democrat who served as lead counsel for Trump‘s first impeachment, said:
This is yet another escalation in his clear effort to take over the government and dismantle our democracy. If Congressional Republicans believe in the Constitution, they will go on the record opposing Trump’s ambitions for a third term.
‘There are methods which you could do it,’ says Trump about possible third term
Good morning, and welcome to our US politics blog amid news that Donald Trump is “not joking” about a possible third term.
The comments on Sunday are the clearest indication yet he is considering ways to breach a constitutional barrier against continuing to lead the country after his second term ends at the beginning of 2029.
“There are methods which you could do it,” Trump said in a telephone interview with NBC News from Mar-a-Lago. And he told host Kristen Welker: “I am not joking.”
He elaborated later to reporters on Air Force One from Florida to Washington: “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 lost that election to Joe Biden.
Still, Trump added: “I don’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.”
As Associated Press reports, the 22nd amendment, added to the constitution in 1951 after President Franklin D Roosevelt was elected four times in a row, says “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice”.
Any attempt to remain in office would be legally suspect and it is unclear how seriously Trump might pursue the idea. The comments nonetheless were an extraordinary reflection of the desire to maintain power by a president who had violated democratic traditions four years ago when he tried to overturn the election he lost to Biden.
We’ll be bringing you more reaction from Trump’s allies and opponents as the day progresses. There are also plenty of other developments:
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Donald Trump has said he is “pissed off” with Vladimir Putin over his approach to a ceasefire in Ukraine and threatened to levy tariffs on Moscow’s oil exports if the Russian leader does not agree to a truce within a month. You can read more on this in our Ukraine blog.
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In the same NBC interview as Trump made his Putin and third term comments, he also threatened to bomb Iran, saying that if “they don’t make a deal” to curb their nuclear weapons programme, “there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before.” You can read Iran’s reaction in our Middle East blog.
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Trump spoke to the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, on Sunday evening as the UK seeks to avoid tariffs that the US president has threatened to impose on a wide range of trade partners on Wednesday. He is calling it “Liberation Day”, saying the world’s top economy has been “ripped off by every country in the world”. Starmer and Trump “agreed to stay in touch in the coming days”.
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Elon Musk gave out $1m checks on Sunday to two Wisconsin voters, declaring them spokespeople for his political group, ahead of a Wisconsin supreme court election that the tech billionaire cast as critical to Trump’s agenda and “the future of civilization”. Musk and groups he supports have spent more than $20m to help conservative favourite Brad Schimel in Tuesday’s race, which will determine the ideological makeup of a court likely to decide key issues in a perennial battleground state.