President Donald Trump has not only refused to rule out running for the presidency again in 2028 but is now actively bragging about just how well he’d do.
“I would love to do it,” the MAGA leader told reporters Monday aboard Air Force One, en route to Japan. “I have my best numbers ever.”
“Am I not ruling it out? You’ll have to tell me,” he went on. “All I can tell you is that we have a great, a great group of people, which they don’t.”
The 22nd Amendment to the Constitution of the United States is fairly unambiguous on the matter. “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice,” it reads, which would clearly apply to Trump given his current and previous tenure at the Oval Office.
Reporters aboard AF1 on a diplomatic tour of Asia were quick to bring the president up on this particular issue of American jurisprudence, ABC News reports, asking Trump if he’d be willing to fight the matter out in the courts.
“I haven’t really thought about it,” he responded. “We have some very good people, as you know, but I’ve had, I have the best poll numbers I’ve ever had.”
Latest polls put the MAGA president’s overall ratings hovering at a miserly 45 percent approval. That’s well below his all-time high of 49 percent at the outset of the COVID-19 pandemic, though it is significantly above the 34 percent he pulled in the aftermath of the Jan. 6 Capitol riot, which he was later impeached for allegedly instigating.
Trump might claim not to have given a lot of thought to what would be his fourth run at the White House, having failed, despite his debunked claims of election rigging, to secure the nation’s highest office in 2020. But his allies have.
Only last week, his former chief adviser, convicted fraudster Steve Bannon, said there was “a plan” in place to sidestep the 22nd Amendment.
“Trump is going to be president in ‘28, and people ought to just get accommodated with that,” he told The Economist. “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is,” he went on, offering few details beyond his assertion that the MAGA president is an “instrument of divine will.”
Bannon’s not alone. Among other GOP figures to have backed a prospective third MAGA presidency is Florida State Representative Randy Fine, who’s urged Congress to consider outright repealing the relevant statutes barring anyone from being elected president more than twice.
Tennessee congressman Andy Ogles has gone even further, introducing a proposal for a constitutional amendment that would explicitly permit Trump—and only Trump—to run again.
Bannon’s comments about Trump’s leadership being divinely ordained would also appear to be of a tenor with the president’s own view of his public service. After surviving not one but two attempts on his life during last year’s campaign, he’s declared in Truth Social posts he is “on a mission from God & nothing can stop what is coming, as well as assuring the nation during his inauguration in January “that my life was saved by God to make America great again.”
In his remarks to reporters Monday, Trump made it clear he thought his top colleagues at the White House would potentially stand a solid chance in any prospective bid for the Oval Office in a few years time.
“We have great people. I don’t have to get into that, but we have one of them standing right here. We have, JD, obviously the vice president is great. Marco’s great,” he said.
But he also made it clear that if he did run again himself, there’s no chance he’d consider playing second fiddle. “Yeah, I’d be allowed to do that,” he said of a prospective vice presidential run. “I guess I think it’s too cute. Yeah, I would rule that out because it’s too cute. I think the people wouldn’t like that. It’s too cute. It’s not—it wouldn’t be right.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment on this story.
