On Jan. 20, Donald Trump took the Oath of Office, solemnly swearing to execute the office of the presidency and, to the best of his ability, “preserve, protect and defend” the United States Constitution.

It’s amazing, when one thinks about it, how brief the presidential oath is, considering the gravity of the job. It’s shorter than most wedding vows, and it grants much more leeway to presidents than spouses get on how to do the job properly.

Essentially, it’s a promise to try your best, but make the Constitution your North Star.

In the more than two months since the day he took that oath, Trump has frustrated critics and flummoxed scholars by testing the limits of how far he can bend the parameters of the world’s longest-running written governmental charter. On Sunday, he made the bold proclamation that, if it suits him come 2028, he’ll ignore those parameters outright.

In a telephone interview with NBC, Trump insisted he’s “not joking” about considering a run for a third term as president to follow his newly minted one when it ends in January of 2029.

That could be taken as a shot across the bow toward members of his own party, who reportedly have taken such musings from Trump in the past as a joke, however clear he and his most ardent supporters are making it that a fourth consecutive run for the office is still on the table.

Long a top Trump ally, former White House chief strategist Steve Bannon told Newsmax that members of the president’s team believe they have “a couple of alternatives” in seeking a third term. Meanwhile, a Trump supporter in the House, Rep. Andy Ogles of Tennessee, introduced a bill that, if passed, would allow presidents three terms in office, if the first two are nonconsecutive.

Trump insisted in his interview with NBC that, while a final decision on whether to pursue it won’t come for a while, there are “methods” by which it could be done. Trump wouldn’t mention any, outside of a possible scenario in which Vice President JD Vance could win in the 2028 general election, then pass the presidency back to him.

There are two major problems with this plan for Trump:

The 22nd Amendment limits presidents to two terms in office. There’s no room for any other reasonable interpretation.

The 12th Amendment prohibits anyone “Constitutionally ineligible” to run for president to be eligible to seek the vice presidency.

Any legal recourse that would even be remotely considered an “alternative” is a constitutional amendment. But getting one of those for any reason is as close to a statistical impossibility as there is in the history of world governments.

Trump could be on the way to getting an amendment with the support of two-thirds of Congress, but Republicans hold slim majorities in the House and Senate that even Trump seems to accept are tenuous. Congress also can call a convention to consider amendments, but it needs two-thirds of the 50 state legislatures to call for that.

Even if either comes to fruition, 38 states — three-quarters of the union — still would have to ratify the amendment to make it law. That’s why more than 11,000 amendments to the Constitution have been proposed and only 27 have been ratified. The nation has ratified only 16 amendments in 225 years, and there has only been one in the past 54 years.

Trump team members’ confidence that it could make a third term happen leaves open questions about whether they plan to abide by constitutional law at all in pursuit of this goal. So over the next few years, members of Congress — especially the ones affiliated with the GOP — should be urged to recall the reasons why the 22nd Amendment survived that arduous process and became law in the wake of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s unprecedented four-term presidency in the 1930s and ’40s.

As the nation’s third president, Thomas Jefferson, said during his second term, “If some termination to the services of the chief magistrate be not fixed by the Constitution … his office, nominally for years, will in fact, become for life. History shows how easily that degenerates into an inheritance.”

Government needs more term limits like the one that governs the presidency. Not fewer.

— Scranton Times-Tribune