By Enyichukwu Enemanna
A United States House of Representatives member, James Clyburn, says President Donald Trump is being serious when he threatens to run for a third term in office, in violation of the Constitution, which caps the presidency at a maximum tenure of two terms.
In an interview with CNN on Monday, Clyburn urged the American people to “wake up” because Trump is planning to contrive a method to circumvent the U.S. Constitution and seek a third term in the White House.
Trump, who took office in January, lost his bid for a consecutive second term in 2020 to Joe Biden, an election after which his supporters staged a deadly riot at Capitol Hill in 2021, resulting in the deaths of several police officers. He governed from 2017 to 2021.
“That is exactly what he is planning to do,” Clyburn said. “I think people better get serious about this. When he says he’s not joking about throwing away the Constitution, which is what he’ll have to do in order to have a third term, and we are not going to rise up in opposition to that? I think it’s time for us all to wake up.”
On Sunday, Trump said he was not joking about trying to serve a third term.
The President’s comments followed his interview with NBC News, where he said, “there are methods which you could” run for a third term.
When NBC asked him if one option would be for Vice President JD Vance to run and then hand off the presidency to Trump, he responded, “That’s one.”
However, the American Constitution states that no one ineligible to be president can run for vice president either, implying that Trump would not be eligible to be Vance’s running mate.
He elaborated later to reporters on Air Force One, while travelling from Florida to Washington, saying, “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.”
