Steve Bannon, chief White House strategist in the opening months of the first Trump administration, says he is part of an effort to secure Donald Trump a third term in office despite a constitutional bar.
“I’m a firm believer that President Trump will run and win again in 2028,” the MAGA podcaster told NewsNation host Chris Cuomo on Tuesday. “A man like this comes along once every century, if we’re lucky. We’ve got him now. He’s on fire, and I’m a huge supporter. Want to see him again in 2028.”
Trump is term-limited under the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, which bars anyone who has been elected president twice before from being voted in again.
The amendment was ratified in 1951, years after Franklin Roosevelt broke with a historic tradition, first started by George Washington, of presidents voluntarily stepping down after two terms.
Cuomo told Bannon, “You know he’s term-limited”—and asked him how the president could get another term, only to receive a cryptic answer.
“We’re working on,” Bannon replied. “I think we’ll have a couple of alternatives. Let’s say that we’ll see what the definition of term limit is.”
Cuomo then asked him to assure the audience he was not plotting an attempted overthrow of the government: “I don’t want people to listen to our interview and say Bannon is cooking up an insurrection.”
Bannon, who spent four months in jail after refusing to testify before the House Committee into the Jan. 6 insurrection, rejected the accusation, saying: “We’re huge believers in democracy, because we know how to, we know how to get votes out.”
The former White House strategist, who now hosts the MAGA livestream and podcast show War Room, also invoked Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential victory, which overturned an era of Republican dominance and realigned American politics under the New Deal coalition and led to a string of dominant Democratic victories.
“We just won one of the biggest sweeping victories,” he said. “We’re in the middle of a 1932-type realignment, if we, if we can continue on and continue to have populist policies, populist nationalist policies.”
Echoing Trump and the White House’s recent attacks on the judiciary—which earned a stern rebuke from Supreme Court Chief Justice John Roberts on Tuesday—Bannon then claimed “anti-democratic forces” in the courts are “trying to obstruct a sitting president of the United States from fulfilling his executive mandate.”
Bannon—a first-generation Trump backer who was the chairman of Breitbart News when critics say the alt-right outlet published racist, xenophobic and antisemitic content—has clashed with Elon Musk, Trump’s broligarch lieutenant, whom he has called a ‘parasitic illegal immigrant.’
As a commentator, Bannon has insisted he will guard against Musk’s C-Suite intrusion into the populist movement he helped usher into the White House. There has also been speculation he could run for president himself in 2028, with Politico reporting last week that he has mused about the idea in private.
Bannon denied he has 2028 ambitions in his interview with Cuomo, saying: “I’ve already endorsed President Trump.”
