President tells NBC ‘there are methods’ in securing a third term despite constitutional barriers

Good morning, and welcome to our US politics blog amid news that Donald Trump is “not joking” about a possible third term.

The comments on Sunday are the clearest indication yet he is considering ways to breach a constitutional barrier against continuing to lead the country after his second term ends at the beginning of 2029.

“There are methods which you could do it,” Trump said in a telephone interview with NBC News from Mar-a-Lago. And he told host Kristen Welker: “I am not joking.”

He elaborated later to reporters on Air Force One from Florida to Washington that “I have had more people ask me to have a third term, which in a way is a fourth term because the other election, the 2020 election, was totally rigged.” Trump lost that election to Joe Biden.

Still, Trump added: “I don’t want to talk about a third term now because no matter how you look at it, we’ve got a long time to go.”

Donald Trump has said he is “pissed off” with Vladimir Putin over his approach to a ceasefire in Ukraine and threatened to levy tariffs on Moscow’s oil exports if the Russian leader does not agree to a truce within a month. You can read more on this in our Ukraine blog.

In the same NBC interview as Trump made his Putin and third term comments, he also threatened to bomb Iran, saying that if “they don’t make a deal” to curb their nuclear weapons programme, “there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before”. You can read Iran’s reaction in our Middle East blog.

Trump spoke to the British prime minister, Keir Starmer, on Sunday evening as the UK seeks to avoid tariffs that the US president has threatened to impose on a wide range of trade partners on Wednesday. He is calling it “Liberation Day”, saying the world’s top economy has been “ripped off by every country in the world”. Starmer and Trump “agreed to stay in touch in the coming days”.

Elon Musk gave out $1m checks on Sunday to two Wisconsin voters, declaring them spokespeople for his political group, ahead of a Wisconsin supreme court election that the tech billionaire cast as critical to Trump’s agenda and “the future of civilization”. Musk and groups he supports have spent more than $20m to help conservative favourite Brad Schimel in Tuesday’s race, which will determine the ideological makeup of a court likely to decide key issues in a perennial battleground state.