One of the many theories on the possible consequences of an illiberal and authoritarian drift of the federal administration led by Donald Trump It foresees that the tycoon will not accept the constitutional limit of two terms and will try to remain in the White House for more than eight years, transforming what is emerging as an imperial presidency into a sort of "presidency for life”, also considering the advanced age of The Donald, who has now turned 78 and would be 82 at the time of a possible confirmation in 2028.
The idea of a third term for Trump had already been circulating during the 2016 election campaign, even before his surprising victory, and was relaunched with his return to the Oval Office. What gave it credibility was above all an initiative by Andy Ogles, a little-known Republican member of the House of Representatives for the state of Tennessee. Three days after Trump's second inauguration, Ogles introduced to Congress the text of a joint resolution to to amend the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution in order to allow those who have been elected for two non-consecutive terms to serve a third.
In theory, this is not a measure ad personam. However, in practice, it is configured as such. Trump, in fact, is the only one who has the requirements to be able to use it, since former presidents with already two terms behind them – Bill Clinton, George W. Bush e Barack Obama – they covered them consecutively.
Trump, the third term and the 22nd amendment
The two-term limit for the president is established by the Twenty-second Amendment to the Constitution, proposed in 1947 and ratified in 1951. The purpose of the provision is to avoid the repetition of a "presidency for life" as occurred between 1933 and 1945 with the Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
First elected in 1932 and confirmed in the White House in 1936, Roosevelt took advantage of the emergency represented by the Second World War to obtain a third term in 1940, with the promise that he would not send Americans to fight in a "foreign war", and even a fourth in 1944, with the argument that it would not be appropriate to change president while the country was still engaged on the battlefields. against Germany and Japan.
Struck by a cerebral hemorrhage, Roosevelt later died in office on April 12, 1945, less than three months after taking office for his fourth administration. His successor, the Democrat Harry S. Truman, who succeeded him ex officio as vice president, was confirmed in the White House in the 1948 elections.
Concerned even before the establishment of a Democratic hegemony over the presidency that would have cut it off from the top of federal institutions for a long time, the Republican Party, through Earl C. Michener in the House and Robert A. Taft in the Senate, presented Congress with the constitutional amendment that introduced the two-term limit.
So that the provision would not appear to be a measure ad personam against Truman, the Twenty-second Amendment did not apply to the president in office at the time it took effect. Truman, however, did not run for reelection in 1952 and was replaced by Republican Dwight D. Eisenhower.
Also winner of the race for the White House in 1956, although he spent more time on the golf course than dealing with state affairs and had a tendency to delegate his institutional responsibilities to others, Eisenhower proved to be such a popular president that he could have obtained a third term with relative ease in 1960 if, paradoxically, his own party had not helped to prevent him from doing so with the earlier passage of the Twenty-second Amendment.
The constitutional amendment of 1951 provides for a single exception to the two-term limit, which however does not apply to Trump's case. If the vice president takes over from the president after the latter has held office for more than two years, the new tenant of the White House is entitled to serve two full terms after the completion of his predecessor's term.
Democrat Lyndon B. Johnson could have taken advantage of this clause. In fact, he entered the White House on November 22, 1963 following the assassination of John F. Kennedy, who had already been in office for over two and a half years, and won a second term in 1964. However, he declined to run again in 1968 due to the debacle, not only military, that the United States was facing in Vietnam.
USA, the tradition before the amendment of the Constitution
Before Franklin Delano Roosevelt, no president had ever served more than two terms. In 1796, after having been elected twice to the highest federal office, despite knowing that he would not be denied a third term, the first president, George Washington, a figure who aspired to present himself as an impartial personality, wanted to retire to private life, disgusted by the lacerating political disputes that had involved him because he had been dragged against his will into a controversy between the two parties of the time, the Federalist Party and the Democratic Republican Party.
His decision set a precedent that long influenced the behavior of his successors, who they did not feel like breaking the tradition started by Washington. However, throughout the first half of the nineteenth century, even the still unwritten rule of the two-term limit sometimes seemed sufficient to ward off the greatest fear of the statesmen of the still young North American republic: that is, the fear that the presidency would transform itself into a kind of elective monarchy.
Thus first the Federalist Party and then the Whig Party, which replaced it as the opposing force to the Democrats from 1833, they tried in vain to change the Constitution to affirm the principle of the non-re-eligibility of the president after a single term. Ironically, the only two Whigs who ever won the White House – William H. Harrison in 1840 and Zachary Taylor in 1848 – were so committed to the one-term principle that they died in office before they were tempted to run again: the former in 1841, the latter in 1850.
Even those who rose to the top of the federal administration by succeeding a deceased president and completing his term and then being confirmed in subsequent elections did not consider themselves entitled to run for a third term. This was the case of the Republican Theodore Roosevelt, who replaced William McKinley, who was assassinated in 1901, and Calvin Coolidge, who succeeded Warren G. Harding, who died in 1922. Roosevelt and Coolidge were elected in 1904 and 1924, respectively, but chose not to seek reelection in 1908 and 1928.
USA, the only two attempts to break tradition
Theodore Roosevelt's renunciation of the possibility of seeking a third term was not definitive. In 1908 he used his influence to have the Republican Party give the nomination for the White House to William Howard Taft and he worked to ensure that he would win the next election in the belief that he was the president best suited to continue his progressive programs.
Within a few years, however, Roosevelt changed his mind. He found that Taft was pursuing conservative politics and, dissatisfied with his successor's administration, in 1912 he tried to wrest the Republican nomination for the White House from him. Defeated at the party's national convention, which re-proposed Taft as its candidate, Roosevelt founded his own party, the Progressive Party, with which he challenged the incumbent president in the 1912 elections.
If he had been the winner, Roosevelt would have won a third term, after having completed McKinley's and obtained one of his own in the elections in 1904. The one who conquered the White House in 1912 was, instead, the Democrat Woodrow Wilson, who exploited the split in the usual Republican vote between the conservative Taft and the progressive Roosevelt.
Wilson also tried to ignore the tradition of two terms. He did so following the Senate's rejection of the Treaty of Versailles, which prevented the United States from joining the League of Nations that Wilson himself had conceived at the end of the Great War as the cornerstone of a system of collective security aimed at preventing a new military conflict of global proportions.
To reopen the question of American participation in this international organization, in 1920 Wilson considered the possibility of running for a third term in the White House in order to complete the work he had begun in foreign policy for the post-World War I period. Although he did not take part in the primaries, Wilson was convinced that a majority of delegates to the Democratic National Convention he could not have avoided assigning the nomination to the incumbent president who, among other things, had also been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for having conceived the League of Nations.
However, in the fall of 1919, Wilson had suffered a double stroke that left him semi-blind and paralyzed on the left side of his body. His health conditions had been hidden from the public, but were known to party leaders, who scuttled his plans for re-election, in light of the realization that he would be unable to campaign.
The Uphill Road to a Third Trump Term
As Wilson had done in 1920, Trump is also a president who in 2028 could argue that he needs a third term to complete his government program. However, unlike Wilson, The Donald has the problem of the 22nd Amendment before him. The solution advanced by Ogles to vary its wording is practicable only in theory.
The changes to the Constitution, in fact, require the approval of both houses of Congress with a qualified majority of two-thirds of the votes and the Republicans currently lack the numbers to meet this requirement. In fact, Trump's party would need 67 votes in the Senate, where it only has 53 seats, and 290 in the House, in which it has 218 members, which could rise to a maximum of 220 if the Republicans were to win the two seats currently vacant.
Furthermore, as has emerged in the debate over the nominations of members of the Trump administration, There is already growing discontent with The Donald among Republican lawmakers and it seems, therefore, unlikely that they would all vote unanimously to give the tycoon the opportunity to run for a third term in 2028. The composition of Congress could obviously change to the advantage of the Trump component in the 2026 elections, when a third of the Senate and the entire House will be renewed.
However, the party that controls the White House typically loses seats, rather than gains them, in midterm elections. Since the early 1934s, there have only been three occasions—1998, 2002, and XNUMX—where the president's party has not suffered a setback in both houses of Congress in midterm elections.
Even if the Ogles resolution were ultimately approved by the Senate and the House, its progress would not be complete. The reason is that, after being approved by Congress, amendments to the Constitution must be ratified by at least three-fourths of the fifty states of the Union to take effect. The threshold of thirty-eight states, however, is difficult to reach., regardless of the procedure followed, which is not specified in the Constitution.
If we assume ratification through state conventions specifically elected for this purpose or through popular referendums and we take into account the outcome of last year's presidential election, Trump won a majority of the popular vote in thirty-two states. The Ogles Amendment would therefore be six states short of achieving the minimum number for ratification.
If, instead, we suppose that the ones called to express themselves are legislative assemblies of individual states, the Republican Party controls only twenty-eight, and thus the thirty-eight threshold would be even further away. Furthermore, the repeal – even partial – of a constitutional amendment, as the Ogles resolution for the Twenty-second Amendment would imply, would be an unusual act.
In fact, only one of the twenty-six amendments to the Constitution passed since 1791 has been revoked: Prohibition on the manufacture, trade and consumption of alcoholic beverages, introduced in 1919, with the XVIII Amendment, and abolished in 1933, with the XXI Amendment.
On the other hand, there are no ploy that would allow Trump to circumvent the 2028nd Amendment as it currently stands. Some political scientists not too familiar with the Constitution, such as Philip Klinkner, have imagined a sort of “relay race” between Trump and JD Vance. According to this scheme, Vance would run for the White House in XNUMX with Trump as his vice president and, if elected, would resign in order to allow The Donald to take over the presidency.
Presented in these terms, this ingenious operation implicitly alludes to an authoritarian “Russification” of US politics, because it recalls the circumstance in which Vladimir Putin, unable to run for the presidency of the Russian Federation for a third consecutive term in 2008, had Dmitry Medvedev elected to this office, reserving the role of prime minister for himself, only to return to the Kremlin four years later to replace his then heir apparent when the latter's term expired.
The maneuver feared by Klinkner and other commentators, however, It is constitutionally impossible since the 12th Amendment, dating back to the now distant 1804, prevents anyone from exercising the function of vice president who is not eligible to become president in case of need. Therefore, in 2028 Trump could not be elected vice president due to the prohibition established by this amendment, as he would be precluded from holding a third term in the White House by reason of the XNUMXnd Amendment.
Third term as a ploy to keep recalcitrant Republican legislators in line
Although a third term falls within the realm of fantasy politics, Trump takes no opportunity to hint that he could remain in office beyond January 20, 2029. For example, he recently stated: “I don’t think I’m going to run again [for the White House], unless they say, ‘He’s so good we’ve got to figure out something else.’”
Malgrado his usual delusion of omnipotence (this week he depicted himself with a royal crown and ermine on all his social media to announce his intention to eliminate the toll to enter Manhattan, introduced by the Democratic governor of the State of New York Kathy Hochul), it is unlikely that The Donald really has too many illusions about this.
It seems much more likely, as historian Douglas Brinkley has argued, that the tycoon wants to exploit the prospect of a hypothetical third term to exercise full control over the Republican members of Congress, stifle dissenting voices in their ranks and prevent defections by those who feel entitled to vote autonomously and independently on the measures supported by the president – especially in the Senate, where there are fourteen Republicans who will remain in office until 2031 – in the belief that in less than four years the White House will have another tenant.
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Stefano Luconi teaches History of the United States of America in the Department of Historical, Geographical and Antiquity Sciences at the University of Padua. His publications include The “indispensable nation”. History of the United States from its origins to Trump (2020) US institutions from the drafting of the Constitution to Biden, 1787–2022 (2022) The black soul of the United States. African Americans and the difficult path to equality, 1619–2023 (2023). The race for the White House 2024. The election of the president of the United States from the primaries to beyond the vote on November 5 (2024).
