President Donald Trump on Friday again suggested he should be permitted to illegally serve a third term as president based on his baseless claim that the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, was “stolen” from him.
Trump was just a few minutes into remarks at a campaign-style rally in Corpus Christi, Texas when he began rattling off a list of purported accomplishments from the first year of his second term in the White House.
“I’ve been here one year. Think of it, one year, little bit more than one year. Now, time flies. Time flies,” he said.
He continued: “Maybe we should — maybe we do one more term. Should we do one more? One more term?”
As the crowd of supporters who’d gathered to hear him speak cheered, he claimed he was “entitled” to an unconstitutional third term “because [Democrats] cheated like hell” during his first re-election campaign in 2020.
“We would actually be entitled to it,” he added.
Trump has previously floated the idea of running for another four years in the White House despite a clear prohibition on doing so laid out in the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, which was passed by the House and Senate in 1947 and ratified by 36 of the then-48 states in 1951 in the wake of Franklin Roosevelt’s unprecedented four terms in the White House starting in 1933 and ending with his death in 1945, just months into his fourth term.
But Trump has also acknowledged the impossibility of serving a third four years in the White House. During a Christmas reception in December, he told attendees he had “a little more than three years left” before he will have to give up power. He also told reporters aboard Air Force One that he would not want to entertain a hypothetical run for vice president in 2028 (which would also be prohibited because the Constitution prohibits anyone from serving as vice president if they cannot be president) because it would be “too cute.”
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