Trump keeps talking about running for a third term. The US Constitution says that can't happen

President Donald Trump has just started his second term, his last one permitted under the U.S. Constitution. But he's already started talking about serving a third one.

“There are methods which you can do it,” Trump insisted to NBC News in a telephone interview on Sunday.

That follows months of Trump making quips about a third term, despite the clear constitutional prohibition on it. “Am I allowed to run again?” Trump joked during a House Republican retreat in Florida in January. Just a week after he won election last fall, Trump suggested in a meeting with House Republicans that he might want to stick around after his second term was over.

This time, Trump said Sunday, “I'm not joking.” But even some allies don't believe that. “You guys keep asking the question,” Senate Majority Leader John Thune told reporters Monday. And Trump is just “having some fun with it,” he said, “probably messing with you.”

Trump's musings often spark alarm among his critics even when they're legally impossible, given that he unsuccessfully tried to overturn his 2020 election loss and has since pardoned supporters who violently attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.

But Trump, who will be 82 when his term ends, has also repeatedly said that this will be his last term. Trying for another also would flatly violate the Constitution. The current gambit seems more like a termed-out president trying to convince his party and the public that he could still be in power four years from now.

Here are some questions and answers related to Trump's occasional comments about a third term:

“No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice,” begins the 22nd Amendment, adopted after President Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected four times in a row. He was last elected in 1944.

It's a fairly straightforward ban on serving more than two terms. Some Trump supporters argue the language is meant to apply only to two consecutive terms because Roosevelt's terms were consecutive, but notably that's not what the amendment says.

Others contend that because the ban is just on being “elected" more than twice, Trump could run as the next president's vice president and, if the ticket won, could simply replace that person if he or she resigns, a possibility the president himself floated on Sunday.

To put it mildly, that would be quite a complex plan to pull off, in no small part because Trump would be 82 during the next election, a year older than former President Joe Biden was during last year's campaign. Also, the Constitution says only people qualified to be president can be vice president, which would seem to bar Trump from pursuing the scheme.

At least one Republican in Congress has been bold enough to propose a constitutional amendment that would allow Trump to seek another term. It has no chance of going anywhere, given the high bar for amending the Constitution, and has yet to move in the new Congress' first months.

Even assuming Trump would attempt another run, a combination of election officials and courts would virtually ensure that he stayed off the ballot.

State officials have long kept would-be candidates off presidential ballots if they didn't meet the basic constitutional criteria, such as being a natural-born U.S. citizen or being at least 35 years old. They would do the same with someone clearly violating the limit on presidential terms.

A version of this unfolded in 2023, when a few states tried to keep Trump off the ballot because they found he violated the 14th Amendment's ban on officials who engaged in insurrection. The U.S. Supreme Court reversed those decisions because no one had ever used the insurrection clause on a presidential candidate before and there were a lot of legal questions about its implementation.

There would be no similar questions about the meaning of the 22nd Amendment, said Derek Muller, a professor at Notre Dame Law School.

“You would not have the factual disputes, so it would be much wider,” Muller said of the number of states keeping Trump off their ballots. “I'm not persuaded the Supreme Court is going to roll over.”

Trump has a long history of taunting his critics to flex his power, but there also could be a strategic reason for his keeping the third-term discussion alive.

Trump is a lame duck president in his final term. Because termed-out politicians will never be on the ballot for the same office again, their political clout usually wanes quickly. The third-term flirtation is a way to try to convince people that Trump will be around in the future.

Trump's aggressive actions at the start of his new term shows that he knows his time is dwindling, Muller said.

“He's governing like he's a lame duck right now, with nothing to lose,” he said.

__

Lisa Mascaro in Washington contributed to this report.

Protesters hold a demonstration outside a Tesla showroom in Santa Monica, Calif., on Saturday, March 29, 2025, against U.S. President Donald Trump and Tesla CEO Elon Musk. (AP Photo/Damian Dovarganes)

Susan MacLean, left, with fellow supporters of President Donald Trump, wears a Trump mask as they gather and wait for the arrival of Trump outside the Trump International Golf Club, Sunday, March 30, 2025, in West Palm Beach, Fla. (AP Photo/Manuel Balce Ceneta)

President Donald Trump talks to reporters as he walks on the South Lawn of the White House, in Washington, Sunday, March 30, 2025. (AP Photo/Jose Luis Magana)

President Donald Trump boards Air Force One at the Naval Air Station Joint Reserve Base in New Orleans, Sunday, Feb. 9, 2025. (AP Photo/Ben Curtis)

President Donald Trump speaks during a meeting with Jordan's King Abdullah II in the Oval Office at the White House, Tuesday, Feb. 11, 2025, in Washington. (Photo/Alex Brandon)

Weather forecasters sometimes warn of storms that unleash such unusual rain they are described as 100-year or even 500-year floods.

Here’s what to know about how scientists determine how extreme a flood is and how common these extreme events are becoming.

Scientists use math to help people understand how unusual a severe flood is and how to compare the intensity of one flood to another.

According to the U.S. Geological Survey, one statistic scientists use is the percentage chance that a flood of a specific magnitude will happen. A 500-year flood means such an event has a 1 in 500 chance, or 0.2%, of occurring in a year.

Another concept scientists use is how frequently an event of a certain intensity is expected. For example, a meteorologist can look at the average recurrence interval of an anticipated flood and see that a similar event is only expected once every 25 years.

Agencies have preferred expressing the percent chance of a flood occurring rather than the recurrence interval because that statistic better represents the fact that rare floods can happen within a few years of each other. It's sort of like rolling a pair of dice and getting double six's twice in a row. It's rare, but statistically possible.

Another term people hear during an impending flood is that it could be a once-in-a-generation or once-in-a-lifetime event, a casual way of saying a flood could be unlike anything many people have experienced.

Houston, Texas, was struck by three 500-year flood events from 2015 through 2017, according to local officials at the time. The events included Hurricane Harvey, the heaviest recorded rainfall ever in the U.S. Homes and businesses were destroyed and cars were swept away by the floods.

Although math can calculate how often to expect floods of specific magnitudes, nature has its own plans, including irregularity. Many interconnected systems in the environment, such as local weather patterns and larger events like El Nino, can contribute to the changing likelihood of floods.

Since the early 1900s, precipitation events have become heavier and more frequent across most of the U.S. and flooding is becoming a bigger issue, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Gases emitted by humans, like carbon dioxide and methane, are warming the atmosphere, allowing it to hold more water vapor. For every 1 degree of Fahrenheit that the temperature warms, the atmosphere can hold nearly 4% more water, which is a 7% increase for every 1 degree Celsius, said Victor Gensini, professor of atmospheric sciences at Northern Illinois University. That vapor eventually falls back to the ground as rain or snow. “We’ve absolutely seen a shift in the probability distribution of heavy rainfall over the last three decades,” Gensini said.

Other regions have experienced drought due to changing precipitation patterns. According to NASA, major droughts and periods of excessive precipitation have been occurring more frequently. Globally, the intensity of extreme wet and dry events is closely linked to global warming.

This story has been corrected to show that the three 500-year flood events in Houston took place over three years, not 24 months. It has also been corrected to show that the origin of the calculations about 500-year flood events in Houston were from local officials, not researchers at the University of Chicago.

Seth Borenstein contributed to this report from Washington, D.C.

The Associated Press’ climate and environmental coverage receives financial support from multiple private foundations. AP is solely responsible for all content. Find AP’s standards for working with philanthropies, a list of supporters and funded coverage areas at AP.org.

FILE - Cars are submerged on a freeway flooded in the aftermath of Hurricane Harvey near downtown Houston, Texas, on Aug. 27, 2017. (AP Photo/Charlie Riedel, File)