Jon Stewart joked Trump “already has the merch,” referring to a red “Trump 2028” cap. Steve Bannon keeps teasing “a plan” to keep Trump in office. The Russian dissident and former chess champion Garry Kasparov warns of democracy’s demise. It’s a perfect storm of satire, conspiracy, and clickbait, but none of it adds up to a third term for Donald Trump.

It gets worse. Salon ran a piece headlined “Trump’s bulldozer is aimed at more than the White House” trying to tie together the demolition of the East Wing and the “Versailles-like ballroom” which will take its place into an elaborate metaphor for Trump destroying democracy. “Post-democratic America,” they call it, finding a partisan ink-blot test in the wallpaper choice. They quote an expert on public memory, who explains “Trump’s physical makeover of the White House represents a larger authoritarian project to reshape American society.” Something about building monuments to oneself so people forget any predecessors. The expert also does not like the new gilding in the Oval Office.

So, is it becoming increasingly clear that Trump has no intention of ever leaving the White House? As Jon Stewart said, you don’t build a new extension on your home if you intend to move soon, right?

Who knows what goes through Trump’s mind when he thinks of 2028, but we do know there is no way he is going to run for a third term. Three things make a genuine third-term bid for Trump impossible: the 22nd Amendment, the extraordinary difficulty of changing that amendment, and the legal implausibility of proposed way-out-there workaround schemes. Talk of a Trump third term is rhetorical, a tool for both sides to wind up their bases and bust the chops of the opposition.

The 22nd Amendment, passed after Franklin Roosevelt died in office, bars two-term presidents from being elected again. The 22nd Amendment was passed in an era when Americans were concerned about the ease with which dictators overseas assumed office. After Hitler and Mussolini both gained power, there was a concern that the same could happen someday in the United States. This concern was only exacerbated by the rise of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who was elected to an unprecedented four terms in a row. So the key language in the Amendment is straightforward: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” That single sentence would, on its face, bar any candidacy by a person who has already won the presidency twice, as Trump of course did in 2016 and in 2024. The Constitution’s text is unambiguous about the electoral limit. You’d need a lawyer like TV’s Better Call Saul to find a loophole.

So why not just change the language of the 22nd Amendment to allow someone to run for a third term? The Founders made it very hard to change the Constitution. It is clear in the original text that to repeal or materially alter an amendment requires either a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and ratification by three-quarters of the states, or a constitutional convention called by two-thirds of state legislatures and subsequent ratification by three-quarters of the states. Both routes are ridiculously high bars, impossible in the divided America of Red and Blue, and have been successfully navigated only rarely in American history, most prominently for something as significant to our democracy as ending slavery or allowing women to vote. So the 2025 House resolution by Rep. Andy Ogles (R-TN) to permit a third presidential term was nothing more than political grandstanding.

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That leaves open the possibility of a Vice President Donald Trump, standing beside the next elected president of the United States, maybe J.D. Vance. The idea would be Trump serving as vice president on a ticket in 2028, then ascending to the presidency when Vance resigns early in his term. One problem is that the 12th Amendment (“No person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice President of the United States”) bars someone ineligible for the presidency from serving as vice president. A counterargument is that in such a scenario Trump would not actually be elected as president, he would simply assume the highest office after President Vance conveniently resigned. But Trump himself ruled out the vice presidential gambit, saying the idea is “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.”

There are a couple of other scenarios to get Trump in for a third term, but they are for dorm-room bull sessions and constitutional nerds only. For example, the 25th Amendment, a leftist favorite, says the vice president becomes president if the office is vacant: “In the case of the removal of the President from office or of his death or resignation, the Vice President shall become President.” Whoever is next in the line of succession “becomes” the president. It is hard to imagine such off-label word play with the bedrock of the Constitution making it past the Supreme Court. In fact, one of the three justices Trump nominated, Amy Coney Barrett, agreed with the obvious reading that the 22nd Amendment bars a third term for anyone. “That’s what the amendment says,” she told Fox News.

That should pretty much end any talk of a third term for Trump, but remember, the people who keep asking him about it in the mainstream media suffer from Trump Derangement Syndrome and have no intention of dropping something so good for headlines, despite how obvious the truth is. And Trump, ever ready to mess with their heads, will always troll along. We heard much of this already in 2020, after Trump lost the election, and pundits were predicting tanks on the White House lawn and the Secret Service having to arrest Trump to get him out of the Oval Office. None of that happened then, and none will happen in 2028.