A third term may be legally almost impossible, but American politics has long shown that political will often precedes the discovery of legal loopholes
A third term may be legally almost impossible, but American politics has long shown that political will often precedes the discovery of legal loopholes.
Jiang Xueqin, an increasingly well-known Chinese-Canadian educator and online geopolitical commentator known as “Professor Jiang,” has in recent months acquired an almost prophetic status, having claimed even during the election campaign that Donald Trump would return to the White House and that the US would head toward a major confrontation with Iran. Clearly, many will say that wasn’t exactly hard to predict, but Jiang has built his name precisely on that. His approach is fairly distinctive, which certainly helps his popularity. He himself describes it through historical patterns, geopolitical incentives, and “game theory.” It’s not classical academic forecasting, but it is suggestive enough that a broad audience has formed around him. This is the context for his new claim — that Trump will “one way or another” reach a third presidential term. The claim is interesting, even if perhaps legally unconvincing, because it hits a sore spot in the current American political moment: what happens when constitutional rules stay the same, but political actors increasingly openly test the limits of their enforcement?
At first glance, everything should be clear. Trump was already elected in 2016 and again in 2024, and the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution states that no one may be elected president more than twice. Formally changing that rule would require a constitutional amendment, and Article V of the Constitution prescribes an extremely difficult process — a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress, or a request from two-thirds of state legislatures to initiate the process, followed by ratification in three-quarters of the states. That is an almost insurmountable obstacle for any project that would look like an amendment written for one man, especially in a deeply polarized country and at a moment when half the political system already fears an authoritarian turn.
But Trump’s politics has never operated solely on the level of formal possibility. It always first creates noise, then habit, and then the impression that what was unthinkable yesterday is already a fully realistic option today.
Trump said in an NBC interview that he’s “not joking” when he talks about a third term and that “there are methods,” although he didn’t elaborate at the time. At the same time, his official store was selling a “Trump 2028” cap with the message “Rewrite the rules” — clearly referring to the Constitution. Steve Bannon, his supporter from the very beginning, has said that “there is a plan.” All of this could be mere provocation, merchandising of symbols, and a way of throwing opponents off balance, but in American politics in recent years the line between performance and program has often proven very thin.
Ulysses S. Grant and the forgotten 1880 attempt at a third term
The idea of an American president trying to return to the White House after two terms did not originate with Donald Trump. Almost a century before the 22nd Amendment was adopted, Ulysses S. Grant — a Union war hero and president from 1869 to 1877 — tried to win the Republican nomination for a third term. The Constitution did not yet forbid it. The only real obstacle was the political tradition established by George Washington when he stepped down after eight years in power.
After leaving the White House, Grant went on a grand world tour, during which he was received almost like an American monarch. Upon his return, his allies, gathered around the powerful Republican faction known as the Stalwarts, tried to turn him back into a presidential candidate. They argued that after a period of political scandals, social unrest, and still-unhealed wounds from the Civil War, the country needed a man whose authority transcended ordinary partisan conflict.
The 1880 Republican convention in Chicago turned into one of the most dramatic in American history. Grant received more than 300 votes in the first round and retained a strong core of support ballot after ballot, but he could not reach the necessary majority. His opponents warned of “Caesarism,” a leader cult, and the danger of the presidency turning into an almost lifelong institution. After as many as 36 rounds of voting, the party turned to a compromise candidate, James Garfield, ending Grant’s comeback bid.
As mentioned, at that time there was still no constitutional provision to stop a third term. What stopped it was political culture — the belief that even the most popular general and former president must not become bigger than the Republican tradition of limited power. In Trump’s case, the situation is almost the reverse: today there is an explicit constitutional ban, but the political culture that should make it unquestionable is considerably weaker. Grant’s failure is therefore a reminder that the American system never rested on the text of the Constitution alone. It also rested on the willingness of elites, parties, and the public to accept a limit even when it might legally be possible to circumvent it.
The first scenario most often mentioned is the so-called vice-presidential loophole: Trump would not run for president but for vice president alongside some loyal Republican candidate. That president would, after winning, simply resign, and Trump — now again as vice president — would assume the office. The 25th Amendment does indeed provide that the vice president becomes president in the event of the president’s death, resignation, or removal. But the 12th Amendment immediately comes into play, stating that a person constitutionally ineligible to hold the office of president cannot be vice president either. So if Trump is ineligible for a new presidential term because of the 22nd Amendment, which bars anyone from being elected president more than twice, then, under the simplest interpretation, he is also ineligible for the vice-presidential office.
There is, however, a small, legally risky nuance here. The text of the 22nd Amendment says no one shall be “elected” president more than twice; it does not explicitly say that such a person may never again “serve” as president through succession. Some legal scholars have therefore, over the years, considered hypothetical scenarios in which a twice-elected president could return to power not through election to the presidency but through a vice-presidential, i.e., succession, construction. More recent legal scholarship largely concludes that such a maneuver would run counter to the intent of the 22nd Amendment, but the very fact that it can be debated shows that the US Constitution is not a self-executing machine. It requires interpreters, courts, election officials, Congress, and political will to enforce the rule.
Franklin Roosevelt and the moment war overturned tradition
Before Franklin Delano Roosevelt, no American president had won a third term. The Constitution did not forbid it, but ever since George Washington an almost sacred unwritten rule had held that a president steps down after eight years. Roosevelt broke that tradition in 1940, at a moment when Europe was already at war, France had been defeated, Britain was under German attack, and the American public was divided between isolationism and fear that the conflict would sooner or later spill across the Atlantic.
Roosevelt did not present his candidacy as personal ambition but as a response to extraordinary historical circumstances. The message was simple — the nation faced a danger unlike any since the Civil War, and it was not the time to change leadership. The Democratic Party accepted that logic, and voters entrusted him with a third term. Four years later, with the US already waging a global war on two continents, the same argument was even stronger. In 1944 Roosevelt won a fourth term as well, even though his health was seriously failing. He died on April 12, 1945 — before the end of World War II, just 18 days before Hitler took his own life in his Berlin bunker.
His example shows why wartime crisis is so attractive to any government wanting to extend its own political lifespan. War does not automatically abolish elections, but it changes how voters perceive continuity, loyalty, and risk. The president is no longer merely a party candidate but commander-in-chief, a symbol of the state, and a guarantor of stability. What in peacetime would look like a dangerous concentration of power can in wartime be presented as responsibility and necessity.
Roosevelt’s fourth term lasted only a few months, and the experience of his long rule prompted Republicans and part of the Democratic Party to turn the unwritten tradition into a constitutional ban. The 22nd Amendment was proposed in 1947 and ratified in 1951.
Trump later said himself that it is, as he put it, “pretty clear” that he’s not allowed to run again, but this is a politician who often changes his positions and who months earlier had flirted with different interpretations.
That vice-presidential candidacy theory would almost certainly quickly run into the obstacle of the 12th Amendment. In other words, the legal door is nearly shut, but Trump’s political style consists of standing in front of a closed door long enough that part of the public starts to believe it is really just an unjust obstacle to the will of the people.
Jiang’s second scenario is even more dramatic — a state of war or major foreign policy crisis that would allow Trump to remain in power through emergency powers. This scenario is weaker on the level of constitutional law. The US held presidential elections during the Civil War and during both world wars. A president cannot simply cancel elections, and the 20th Amendment clearly states that the terms of the president and vice president end at noon on January 20. War, a state of emergency, or a military crisis do not automatically produce extra years in the White House.
Still, in a country that has already been through January 6, a crisis need not unfold like a classic coup d’état. It is enough for enough actors to refuse to accept defeat or the status quo, and for enough institutions to be slow, calculating, or afraid.
Truman’s nearly forgotten exception
When the 22nd Amendment limited American presidents to two elected terms in 1951, its text left one precisely crafted exception. The new rule did not apply to the president who was in office at the moment Congress proposed the amendment. That president was Harry Truman, the man who took over the White House after Roosevelt’s death in April 1945, completed nearly all of his fourth term, and then won his own term in 1948.
Had that exception not existed, Truman would no longer have been eligible to run under the new rule. Since he had spent more than two years of Roosevelt’s term in office, he would only have been allowed to be elected once more — which had already happened in 1948. But Congress, for political and constitutional reasons, decided that the limit would not apply retroactively to the sitting president. Truman was therefore fully entitled, in 1952, to try to win another full term, even though a victory would have meant nearly twelve years at the head of the state.
Initially he left the possibility of a new candidacy open, but his political position was extremely weak. The Korean War had turned into an exhausting conflict without a clear victory, the administration’s popularity was being eroded by inflation, labor unrest, and corruption allegations, and opposition was growing within the Democratic Party. After Senator Estes Kefauver defeated him in the New Hampshire primary, Truman announced in March 1952 that he would not run again.
Jiang may be overreaching in his specific prediction, but not necessarily in his sense of direction. A third Trump term is not likely as a legal maneuver. It is even less likely as a simple wartime extension of power. But it cannot be dismissed as a political project of manufacturing exceptionality — that is, of creating an atmosphere in which Trump is not presented as “an ordinary president limited by term,” but as the necessary leader in a struggle against internal enemies, the migrant threat, the “deep state,” China, Iran, or some new global shock that he himself might help produce. Within such a framework, the two-term rule becomes, for his supporters, less a constitutional boundary and more a bureaucratic nuisance standing in the way of a “historic mission.”
American democracy has long lived off its own myth of institutional resilience. That myth was not entirely empty — it is a fact that the system survived the Civil War, assassinations, the Depression, world wars, Watergate, and many other crises. But today’s problem is different. The US is no longer a self-confident industrial republic that can rely on a growing middle class, triumphant productive capitalism, and relative elite consensus. It is an empire under pressure, a society with deep class contradictions, and a state finding it ever harder to finance its own global dominance without internal political radicalization. In such an environment, the personalization of power does not appear as a random eccentricity, but as a symptom.
The conclusion must therefore remain twofold. Legally speaking, a third Trump term would be extremely difficult to achieve, almost certainly blocked by the 22nd Amendment, the 12th Amendment, and the very structure of the election calendar. Politically speaking, the possibility should not be dismissed as a mere joke — not because the most likely scenario is that Trump will simply refuse to leave the White House on January 20, 2029, and that everyone will let him, but because the boundaries of American politics have for years now been shifting precisely through “impossible” statements that are first mocked, then normalized, and finally become the subject of serious legal debate. The odds are not high. But in a country that is simultaneously a nuclear superpower, a polarized society, and a nervous empire in relative decline, they are not low enough to dismiss out of hand either.
About the Author
Mario Hoffmann is an independent analyst and writer covering global economics, geopolitics, and international affairs. With a background in history and politics, he writes for EconoPuls to provide in-depth context on the stories shaping our world.
