US President Donald Trump has claimed he has the “right” to seek the White House again in 2028, telling supporters at a campaign rally in Iowa that the election he lost in 2020 had been rigged against him.
Speaking in Sioux City on October 22, Trump first conceded that the wording of the US Constitution appeared to leave him little room. He then dismissed the obstacle, saying: “I think I have the right to run again because they cheated.”
The 22nd Amendment bars any person from being elected president more than twice. Trump won in 2016, lost in 2020 and returned to office in 2024.
His claim that the 2020 contest was stolen has been rejected by federal courts, by state election officials and by his own Department of Justice, none of which found evidence of fraud on the scale he alleged.
The rally was staged to lift Republican candidates before the midterm elections on November 3. Trump appeared alongside Ashley Hinson, the congresswoman running for Iowa’s Senate seat.
Hours earlier the president had brushed aside a question about whether he would endorse Vice President JD Vance for 2028 should Republicans lose their majorities in Congress. He said he had not given the matter any thought and that there was time enough to come.
Vance, long treated as the obvious heir, said in an interview on October 19 that he believed he would receive Trump’s backing if he ran, though he added that there was merit in a candidate running his own race.
In the same interview he declined to follow Trump in endorsing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu before the Israeli election on October 27. “I’m not getting involved in Israeli elections,” he said.
For European capitals, the vice president is the more consequential figure of the two. Vance has intervened repeatedly in the politics of member states, most pointedly in Budapest in April, when he accused EU officials of interfering in the Hungarian election that Viktor Orbán went on to lose.
European Union governments are negotiating trade, defence spending and Ukraine policy with an administration whose direction after 2028 remains unsettled. Trump’s latest remarks keep that question open, and leave his party with little reason to look past him.
