Recently, President Donald Trump suggested America might be better off skipping the midterm elections altogether.
The 79-year-old made the shocking claim in an interview with Reuters on Wednesday, responding to new polling numbers showing Democrats gaining ground. According to the Lincoln Project, 18 House races have recently flipped in Democrats’ favor, and the Senate is considered up for grabs.
“It’s some deep psychological thing, but when you win the presidency, you don’t win the midterms,” Trump said. He went even further, boasting that the first year of his second term had gone so well that “when you think of it, we shouldn’t even have an election.”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt quickly tried to spin Trump’s comments on Thursday. Leavitt, 28, said she was in the room during the interview, which was not recorded, and insisted he was “joking” about skipping elections.
“He was saying, ‘We’re doing such a great job, we’re doing everything the American people thought. Maybe we should just keep rolling,’ ” Leavitt claimed. “He was speaking facetiously.”
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Trump also insisted the economy was the strongest “in history,” brushing off questions about rising prices. “A lot of times, you can’t convince a voter,” he said. “You have to just do what’s right. And then a lot of the things I did were not really politically popular. They turned out to be when it worked out so well.”
This isn’t the first time Trump has toyed with bending or ignoring constitutional norms. He has repeatedly floated the idea of a third term in office, despite the Constitution explicitly forbidding it. Merchandise with “TRUMP 2028” began appearing in the White House gift shop just months into his second term.
In a March 2025 interview with NBC News, Trump insisted he was “not joking” about considering another term, even though he would be the oldest president in U.S. history by the end of his second term in January 2029.
“A lot of people want me to do it,” he said. “I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.”
Trump’s loyalists have also entertained the idea of a third term. Steve Bannon, his former chief strategist, told The Economist in October 2025, “He’s gonna get a third term. Trump is gonna be president in ’28, and people just sort of [need to] get accommodated with that.”
When asked about the 22nd Amendment, which forbids a president from being elected more than twice, Bannon claimed there is a plan.
“There’s many different alternatives. At the appropriate time, we’ll lay out what the plan is, but there’s a plan,” Bannon said. “We need him for at least one more term, right? And he’ll get that in ’28. We had longer odds in ’16 and longer odds in ’24 than we’ve got in ’28. We have to finish what we started.”
Featured image via Political Tribune Gallery
