There are a lot of rules that American presidents have to follow, most of them Donald Trump seems to have broken. According to Robert De Niro, if Trump manages to make it in for another term after the 2020 election, he might go to some pretty drastic measures to stay in for a third term.
US presidential terms go for 4 years, so that could mean we’re stuck with President Trump until 2028.
The Americans are all about their amendments, and the 22nd one is in place to make sure that nobody can stay in for longer than two terms. It reads:
No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of President more than once.
Great, makes sense. So how does Robert De Niro reckon Trump will get around the constitution? By starting a war.
In an interview, De Niro said:
“I’m worried because if he gets re-elected, it’s gonna be very, very bad—very bad on a lot of levels. We already have a lot of reparations, if you will—repairs—to do to the damage that he’s already done, and he has to be gotten out.
He’s going to be history at one point, though he’d love to be president for life. He jokes about it. I think that if he became president for a second term he’d try to have a third term, and let smarter people manipulate it into getting us into some kind of altercation: a war.”
This is, of course, assuming that Trump manages to avoid impeachment and win a second term in 2020. But if he clears those hurdles, then who knows? As De Niro said, he’s joked about being president forever before, and starting a whole war out of selfish reasons doesn’t seem so far fetched for Donald Trump.