Trump says he’s serious about running for a third term
By 
This was pretty much inevitable:
President Donald Trump said Sunday that “I’m not joking” about trying to serve a third term, the clearest indication 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, his private club.
He elaborated later to reporters on Air Force One from Florida to Washington that “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 Democrat Joe Biden. . . .
Jeremy Paul, a constitutional law professor at Boston’s Northeastern University, said “there are no credible legal arguments for him to run for a third term.”
NBC’s Kristen Welker asked 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.
I’ve got to disagree with the idea that there are no credible legal arguments here, because what counts as a credible legal argument is a purely sociological question (h/t OW Holmes), and as I pointed out way back in November, there is a legal argument that five current members of the SCOTUS might well buy. That argument is that the restrictions of the 22nd amendment aren’t relevant to the 12th amendment’s definition of what it means to be ineligible to hold the office of the vice presidency, if you read the 22nd amendment to only prohibit the election of a president more than twice. If read that way, Trump could run for the vice presidency in 2028, and then take office upon the resignation of the fake presidential candidate at the top of the ticket (Now squeal like a pig JD).
You can say that’s an absurd misreading, but what you say and I say is irrelevant, again sociologically speaking, which is, if you’re a legal realist in good standing, the only “reality” that legal rules, as opposed to say the laws of physics, ever have. And what’s absurd at the moment is to imagine that the Republican party would lift a finger to stop any of this from happening. What the SCOTUS as currently constituted would do is more speculative, but I could without even breaking a sweat draft an opinion that I can easily imagine John Roberts authoring, in which whether the 22nd amendment’s restrictions ought to be read back into the 12th amendment is treated as a non-justiciable political question, that ought to be decided by the political process, not the courts. See, e.g., Nixon v. United States (can you believe people get paid to do this?).
As to whether Trump could get pseudo-elected three and a half years from now, I’m pretty much giving up on even trying to guess what the Ariana Grande Theory of Politics voters will be thinking, or “thinking,” at that point, since the entire Trump era is just a testament to the massive irrationality of our political process. But I think we can say with considerable confidence that Trump isn’t going to leave office voluntarily.