Sid Salter
- While the realistic chances for a third Trump term are very slim, columnist Sid Salter says the very discussion of the attempt is a whopping distraction that benefits the Trump Administration.
How realistic are calls among his political followers for a third term in office for President Donald Trump?
The 22nd Amendment stands as the most obvious impediment to a third Trump term. The operative language of the 22nd Amendment is as follows: ““No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice, and no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.”
Only one U.S. chief executive has held the office for more than two terms. Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt was elected President of the United States in 1932, 1936, 1940 and 1944. Before FDR’s 1940 election, a “tradition” had been established, albeit one without the force of law, that presidents typically served only two terms in office.
The tradition traced back to the nation’s first president – General George Washington, who famously feared the establishment of a king in the U.S. rather than elected citizen leadership. But no law prohibited a U.S. president from seeking a third term and several did including U.S. Grant in 1880, Teddy Roosevelt in 1912, Woodrow Wilson in 1920, and for a brief time, Harry S. Truman.
FDR’s unprecedented four terms in office – punctuated by the Great Depression and World War II – enabled him to become not the first president to seek election to a third term, but he was decidedly the first to be able to win a third and later fourth term in the White House as American voters valued a steady, experienced leader in times of global crisis.
But concern was evident during FDR’s third and fourth terms over his accumulation of power and whether multiple terms past two four-year terms was good for democracy.
After Roosevelt died in 1945, the nation’s political wheels began to turn in earnest for a constitutional bar to a president seeking more than two terms. The 22nd Amendment was the vehicle used to enact presidential term limits, approved by Congress in 1947 and ratified by the states in 1952. (As the sitting president, Truman was exempt from the amendment in the 1952 Democratic presidential primary, which he lost.)
Earlier this year, Trump told NBC News that he did not rule out a bid for a third presidential term and that there were methods for doing so.
“A lot of people want me to do it,” Trump said. “But, I mean, I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.”
One theory being offered by Trump allies is an arrangement in which current Vice President J.D. Vance could seek the presidency and then step aside for Trump to assume the office. Such a gambit would bring a protracted legal challenge and is considered far-fetched – particularly in light of the language of the 12th Amendment, which holds: “But no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President.”
Another method would be a more straightforward effort at repealing the 22nd Amendment. That would require that two-thirds of both houses of Congress and three-quarters of all U.S. states must vote to abolish the 22nd Amendment. That scenario strains credulity, given the outcome of the 2024 election.
Two-thirds of the states could, theoretically, call for a constitutional convention to propose a new amendment, but 38 of 50 states would have to ratify any new amendment. Again, that’s unlikely in the extreme.
While the realistic chances for a third Trump term are very slim, the very discussion of the attempt is a whopping distraction that benefits the Trump Administration particularly during the early years of his second term – when the pace of unprecedented changes in the operations and policies of the federal government has the legislative and judicial branches of the federal government back on their heels as Trump and his allies forge ahead,
Even the very discussion of it is a powerful distraction. One House member is putting forth a measure to enable Trump in this fight: Rep. Andy Ogles (R-Tenn.) is introducing a resolution to amend the 22nd Amendment. Ogles’ amendment would allow any president to serve a third term if their first two terms were non-consecutive.
Sid Salter
