587
Why plans are already in motion for a Trump third term – no matter what the law says
(www.independent.co.uk)
this post was submitted on 29 Mar 2025
587 points (98.2% liked)
News
28284 readers
5197 users here now
Welcome to the News community!
Rules:
1. Be civil
Attack the argument, not the person. No racism/sexism/bigotry. Good faith argumentation only. This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban. Do not respond to rule-breaking content; report it and move on.
2. All posts should contain a source (url) that is as reliable and unbiased as possible and must only contain one link.
Obvious right or left wing sources will be removed at the mods discretion. Supporting links can be added in comments or posted seperately but not to the post body.
3. No bots, spam or self-promotion.
Only approved bots, which follow the guidelines for bots set by the instance, are allowed.
4. Post titles should be the same as the article used as source.
Posts which titles don’t match the source won’t be removed, but the autoMod will notify you, and if your title misrepresents the original article, the post will be deleted. If the site changed their headline, the bot might still contact you, just ignore it, we won’t delete your post.
5. Only recent news is allowed.
Posts must be news from the most recent 30 days.
6. All posts must be news articles.
No opinion pieces, Listicles, editorials or celebrity gossip is allowed. All posts will be judged on a case-by-case basis.
7. No duplicate posts.
If a source you used was already posted by someone else, the autoMod will leave a message. Please remove your post if the autoMod is correct. If the post that matches your post is very old, we refer you to rule 5.
8. Misinformation is prohibited.
Misinformation / propaganda is strictly prohibited. Any comment or post containing or linking to misinformation will be removed. If you feel that your post has been removed in error, credible sources must be provided.
9. No link shorteners.
The auto mod will contact you if a link shortener is detected, please delete your post if they are right.
10. Don't copy entire article in your post body
For copyright reasons, you are not allowed to copy an entire article into your post body. This is an instance wide rule, that is strictly enforced in this community.
founded 2 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
If you are looking for a loophole, I think there is an argument to be made that if he is elected to the office of the vice president and the president steps down, that would allow a “3rd term”.
I would love to be wrong, but I wouldn’t be shocked if that is the play.
Edit: dhork points out the 12th amendment should block this.
The 12th amendment states
That seems pretty definitive. The only attack to it I can see (and it's total bullshit) is that the Originalists on this court may insist on interpreting this amendment based on the state of the Constitution when it was ratified in 1804, and the term limits weren't passed until 1952.
The way around that is making him speaker of the house and having both the president and vice president resign. Speaker doesn't have any real requirements on it.
The Constitution leaves what happens if the Presidency and VP are both vacant at the same time up to Congress, and Congress has passed various Presidential Succession Acts, the most recent being 1947. The language in that Act specifically exempts anyone who would otherwise be ineligible from becoming President.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Presidential_Succession_Act
And this has been enforced in the past; Cabinet Secretaries who were not natural-born citizens have not been included in the succession list. I remember specifically that when Madeline Albright was Clinton's Secretary of State, she was not on the list because she was born in Prague.
I vaguely remember Trump briefly trying to be speaker of the house at some point, or at least talking about it.
From what I remember MTG nominated him during the McCarthy drama but it was just to add to the drama.
It's been floated around for a bunch of politicians. They were talking about making Hillary speaker while impeaching Trump and Pence too.
TIL! Thanks!
The loop hole would be that suddenly declare that he wasn't officially elected because he cheated his way there /s