Movie star Robert De Niro has a theory how President Donald Trump could end up staying in the White House for a third term.
It involves Trump declaring war in order to remain in office past 2024.
De Niro, star of Netflix’s upcoming film “The Irishman” ― who has previously called the president a “real racist,” a “wannabe gangster” and a white supremacist ― shared the idea in a preview of a new interview that The Daily Beast published online Wednesday.
Just to be clear, the 22nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution ― passed by Congress in 1947 after President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s election to a fourth term in 1944 ― limits presidents from serving more than two terms. But De Niro fears Trump may try to find a way to do so.
The actor noted how Trump has often joked about being president for life. He said he thought that if Trump “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.”
Director Martin Scorsese, with whom De Niro worked on the Netflix movie, first suggested the idea.
“The only other president who served a third term was Roosevelt because he was in a war, and this fool would go and start something,” De Niro explained. “This was what Marty Scorsese was saying, and I said, ‘Marty, I never thought of that. I never thought he’d go for a third term if there was a war or something.’”
Read the full interview with The Daily Beast here.
This story has been updated with a reference to the 22nd Amendment.
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