Will Trump Get a Third Term? Professor Jiang Says Yes

Can Trump run for a third term? Under the Constitution, no. The 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, says no one can be elected president more than twice, and Trump himself said in August 2026 that the law against it is very strong. Professor Jiang Xueqin predicts it happens anyway. In a September 2026 interview he said flatly that Trump is getting a third term, and tied it to war, a draft and possible blackouts around the 2026 midterms or the 2028 election. Here is what the law says, what Trump has said, and how we will score Jiang's call.

Can Trump legally run for a third term?

Not as the law stands. The 22nd Amendment was written after Franklin D. Roosevelt won four elections, and it bars anyone from being elected president more than twice. Repealing or rewriting it would take a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and ratification by 38 states, which no party is anywhere near.

Supporters have floated workarounds. In January 2025, Rep. Andy Ogles proposed an amendment allowing a third term for presidents whose two terms were not back to back, which would cover only Trump; it has gone nowhere. Another idea is for Trump to run as vice president and step up later, but the 12th Amendment says no one ineligible to be president can be vice president. Trump himself ruled out the vice-president route in October 2025, calling it "too cute."

What has Trump said about a third term?

He has kept the door half open for almost two years. In March 2025 he told NBC there were methods to do it and that he was not joking; a month later his company's online store was selling Trump 2028 hats. In May 2025 he said he would serve two terms and named JD Vance and Marco Rubio as possible successors, and in May 2026 he joked about leaving office "eight or nine years from now" (timeline of his remarks). On August 11, 2026, he told Roll Call that the law is very strong against a third term, while saying he would love to run and that crowds chant 2028 at his rallies.

Why Professor Jiang thinks Trump gets a third term

Jiang made the call twice in one week: on Diary of a CEO on September 14, 2026, and on the Jack Neel podcast on September 19. His argument is psychological, not legal. When people are afraid, he says, they attach themselves to whoever seems able to protect them, even someone they dislike, much as hostages in the 1973 Stockholm bank siege came to side with their captors. On this view, every crisis Trump presides over makes voters more dependent on him, not less.

He sketched 2028 like this: the Iran war gone wrong, perhaps 10,000 US troops stuck on the ground, a draft being called and protests demanding impeachment. Offered Trump against Kamala Harris, Gavin Newsom or even Barack Obama, he expects frightened voters to choose the man he calls a gangster. Asked how a third term would actually happen, he said he could not say.

Will there be a blackout before the 2028 election?

The most concrete new call in the interview is about the power grid. Asked whether there will be a blackout, Jiang said he thinks "they're planning it," possibly around the midterms or the 2028 election. His logic: with inflation, fuel prices and a possible AI bust making voters angry, attacks on the grid would let the government shift the blame. He pointed to New York, where a long outage would spoil every fridge in the city within a day.

The grid really is under strain. NERC, the body that oversees reliability in North America, warned in its 2025–26 winter assessment that much of the continent faced elevated risk of shortfalls in extreme cold, with demand up about 20 gigawatts in a year. Physical attacks happen too: in December 2022, gunfire at two substations in Moore County, North Carolina cut power to about 45,000 customers for days. What we could not find is the White House statement forecasting blackouts that Jiang referred to. And the biggest blackout in US history, in August 2003, which hit about 50 million people across the Northeast and Ontario, came from a software failure and untrimmed trees, not an attack.

The case against a third term

Every route runs into the Constitution, Congress or the courts. Election-law scholar Rick Hasen doubts Trump's lawyers will seriously try and doubts the Supreme Court would let him run. Age is a second wall: Trump turns 82 in June 2028, and polling from YouGov in 2025–26 found about half of Americans already thought he was too old to be president. The third is the calendar. The midterms on November 3, 2026 will decide how much room he has in Congress; our midterm predictions article tracks Jiang's calls for that vote.

The strongest version of Jiang's case does not need a legal theory. It is about crisis politics: emergencies have extended leaders' time in power before, from Roosevelt's third and fourth terms during the Second World War to Britain putting off its general election from 1940 until the war in Europe ended in 1945. That precedent cuts both ways, though. Roosevelt's wartime terms are exactly what produced the 22nd Amendment.

How we will score these predictions

Third term: a hit if Trump is sworn in for a third term, or remains president past noon on January 20, 2029, by any route. Anything else is a miss on that date. The call has been on our predictions scorecard since his Diary of a CEO interview.

Blackout: a hit if a single outage leaves at least one million US customers without power at once and officials attribute it to an attack or sabotage, between September 19, 2026 and November 30, 2028. Weather or equipment failures do not count, because Jiang's claim is that the blackout is planned. For how his dated calls have scored so far, see is Professor Jiang really 77% accurate?