President Donald Trump has again suggested he should be permitted to illegally serve a third term as president over his baseless claim that the 2020 election, which he lost to Joe Biden, was “stolen” from him.
Trump was just a few minutes into remarks at a campaign-style rally in Corpus Christi, Texas Friday when he began rattling off a list of purported accomplishments from the first year of his second term in the White House.
“I've been here one year. Think of it, one year, little bit more than one year. Now, time flies. Time flies,” he said.
He continued: “Maybe we should — maybe we do one more term. Should we do one more? One more term?”
As the crowd of supporters who’d gathered to hear him speak cheered, he claimed he was “entitled” to an unconstitutional third term “because [Democrats] cheated like hell” during his first re-election campaign in 2020.
“We would actually be entitled to it,” he added.
Trump has previously floated the idea of running for another four years in the White House despite a clear prohibition on doing so laid out in the 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
But Trump has also acknowledged the impossibility of serving a third term of four years in the White House. During a Christmas reception in December, he told attendees he had “a little more than three years left” before he will have to give up power.
He also told reporters aboard Air Force One that he would not want to entertain a hypothetical run for vice president in 2028 (which would also be prohibited because the Constitution prohibits anyone from serving as vice president if they cannot be president) because it would be “too cute.”
The president, who spoke outdoors at the Port of Corpus Christi — a rarity since he survived a July 2024 assassination attempt in Butler, Pennsylvania — also took time out of what was supposed to be a speech about his energy policy to rant about a back-bench Democratic congresswoman from Minnesota, Ilhan Omar, for having heckled him at his State of the Union speech this past week.
He complained that Democrats had “just sat there” during his speech — the typical reaction of the opposition party — rather than stand for partisan applause lines before singling out Omar for ridicule.
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“How about Omar? Screaming, screaming, screaming, like a lunatic. You looked at her bulging eyes, she's crazy,” he said.
The Minneapolis congresswoman spent more than 30 seconds shouting to interrupt the president on Tuesday after he began boasting of his immigration crackdown in her home state.
The uproar began after Trump urged those who believe “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens" to stand up.
"Isn't that a shame? You should be ashamed of yourself, not standing up," the president said looking towards Democratic lawmakers.
Omar and Michigan congresswoman Rashida Tlaib — members of the “Squad,” an informal group of progressive House Democrats — then started yelling at the president from their seats.
“You have killed Americans!” Omar could be heard shouting repeatedly, apparently referencing the two U.S. citizens, Renee Good and Alex Pretti, who were killed by federal immigration agents in Minnesota.
“You should be ashamed,” Omar, who has frequently been the target of Trump’s ire, added.
Trump’s Friday afternoon speech is part of what the White House has billed as a series of appearances meant to tout his administration's economic record ahead of November’s midterm elections.
But while his prepared remarks did touch on energy policy and his administration’s purported economic wins over the first 13 months of his term, he and his Republican Party allies may be fighting an uphill battle to convince Americans to let them retain unified control of the federal government.
Recent polling results show voters have significant doubts about his priorities and increasingly are questioning whether Trump’s policy initiatives are helping solve the problems he was re-elected to tackle.
One survey from CNN and SSRS released Monday found that a supermajority of Americans — 61 percent — say his policies will send the country in the wrong direction, while only 36 percent approve of his performance. That’s a 12-point drop from the 48 percent approval rating Trump enjoyed when he last addressed Congress.
And on what was once one of his strongest issues, the economy, 57 percent of Americans say they disapprove of Trump; in a separate ABC News/Washington Post poll on inflation and tariffs, that’s even higher, at 65 and 64 percent respectively.
Trump’s tariff policies have been in flux over the last week in the wake of the Supreme Court’s landmark finding that he could not impose tariffs by invoking the 1977 International Emergency Economic Powers Act, because the Carter-era law didn’t explicitly give him the authority to impose import taxes for any reason.
While the president didn’t address the decision in his remarks on Friday, he took time on the way to the rally to complain about it on Truth Social, writing that the ruling “could allow for Hundreds of Billions of Dollars to be returned to Countries and Companies that have been ‘ripping off’ the United States of America for many years.”
“It doesn’t make sense that Countries and Companies that took advantage of us for decades, receiving Billions and Billions of Dollars that they should not have been allowed to receive, would now be entitled to an undeserved ‘windfall,’ the likes of which the World has never seen before, as a result of this highly disappointing, to say the least, ruling,” he wrote before asking if a “rehearing” of the case would be possible by the highest court in the land.
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