Saturday Night Live star Colin Jost’s take on Donald Trump’s next big move isn’t likely to bring smiles to the faces of his anti-Trump fans.
“I think I think Donald Trump’s going to get a third term. That’s my prediction,” Jost, 43, said on Tuesday, leaving SubwayTakes host Kareem Rahma speechless.
“I predicted it when he was running in 2020,” he continued. “I was like, if he gets elected, it’s for eight years.
Throughout his presidency, Trump, 79, has proclaimed his ambitions for a third presidential term.
“Am I not ruling it out? You’ll have to tell me,” Trump told reporters aboard Air Force One in October. “All I can tell you is that we have a great—a great group of people, which they don’t.”
Jost, who routinely makes Trump the butt of his Weekend Update jokes and parodies Trump-appointed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth on SNL, explained how the two-term president could pull off the maneuver.
“He’s going to have something where he’s like, ‘Democrats stole my first term because of the impeachment, so I didn’t even have a first term, so this is actually my first term, so I get one more,’” Jost explained. “And then the Supreme Court will be like, ‘That’s a pretty good argument. It seems like we’ve got to overlook the Constitution.’”
“I think we just have to prepare for it,” he added.
“You’re being serious right now?” Rahma, 39, responded. “Now you’re scaring me.”
“I think no doubt, because who’s going to beat him?” Jost continued, stifling a laugh. “No one. There’s no one that’s going to beat him.”
Six years after the only president in U.S. history to serve more than two terms, Franklin D. Roosevelt, died in 1945, Congress ratified the 22nd Amendment. The Amendment states very clearly that “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”
Despite the precisely worded Amendment, the returning president has continually chosen not to rule out a potential third term.
Just last week, Trump declared in a rambling summit speech that he would leave office “eight or nine years from now.”
His close allies, too, have described a behind-the-scenes scheme to keep Trump in office. In October, his former chief adviser, Steve Bannon, told The Economist that there was “a plan” in place to circumvent the pesky amendment.
“Trump is going to be president in ‘28, and people ought to just get accommodated with that,” Bannon, 72, said. “At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is,” declaring that the president was an “instrument of divine will.”
As it stands, Trump will be the oldest sitting president in U.S. history when he leaves office in 2028.
An unprecedented third term would push him to 86 years old, four years older than the previous oldest president, Joe Biden, at the end of his term.
