For Jeremy Paul, a Northeastern legal scholar, the question is moot because it will ultimately have to answer to the 22nd Amendment in court.
By running as vice president on a potential JD Vance ticket in 2028, could Donald Trump bypass the U.S. Constitution and become president a third time?
Outlandish though it may seem, it’s a question being asked after Trump said he was thinking about pursuing a third term. “A lot of people want me to do it,” he told NBC’s Kristen Welker.
The Constitution clearly prohibits presidents who have already served two terms from running again, says Jeremy R. Paul, a professor of law and former dean of the Northeastern University School of Law.
“Under any reasonable interpretation of the 22nd Amendment, he can’t run again,” Paul says. “The only way to do it is if he openly breaks the law.”
The 22nd Amendment states: “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.”
However, suppose you flip the ballot, as has been suggested, and, after completing his second term in 2028, Trump runs as Vance’s vice president. The hypothetical suggests that Vance, if elected in three years’ time, could then pass on the presidency to Trump in an end-run of the Constitution.
For Paul, the question is moot because it will ultimately have to answer to the 22nd Amendment in court, where it will likely be struck down. “It’s a ludicrous argument,” he says.
“They could argue that Trump isn’t constitutionally ineligible to serve as president — only to be elected president,” Paul says.
He continues: “The framers did the best they could to write the Constitution in such a way as to reflect their intent. On this specific issue, it would be lawless for the courts to rule any other way. The meaning of the 22nd Amendment could not be clearer.”
Congress passed the 22nd Amendment, which became part of the Constitution in 1951, after President Franklin D. Roosevelt served an unprecedented four consecutive terms in office.
There’s another constitutional safeguard in the 12th Amendment, which states that “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of president shall be eligible to that of vice-president of the United States.”
The only way for Trump to retain power after he leaves office in 2028 would be to convince Congress to amend the Constitution. But a constitutional amendment requires a supermajority of support (or two-thirds) in both congressional chambers, and then ratification by three-fourths of U.S. states — a steep task for any political coalition at any point in time, Paul says. (The last time the Constitution was amended was in 1992.)
All in all, “if he’s serious, I don’t think [Trump] will get anywhere with this,” Paul says.