Could Trump Actually Pull Off An Authoritarian Third Term?
The 22nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution says, “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.”
Seems pretty clear-cut, right?
But read carefully—”no person shall be elected” to the office. And therein lies the keys to Donald Trump’s fantasies of a third term, saying to NBC’s Kristen Welker. “There are methods which you could do it.”
So how exactly would Trump become president without being elected president?
One way, Trump said, would be to swap tickets with Vice President JD Vance. He would run on a ticket with Vance and get elected vice president. Then, Vance would give up the office out of the goodness of his heart and resign, or maybe Trump would just shiv him, who knows. Trump wouldn’t care either way. Regardless, he would then become president.
Except that won’t work.
The 12th Amendment says, “no person constitutionally ineligible to the office of President shall be eligible to that of Vice-President of the United States.”
Well, that seems pretty clear-cut, doesn’t it? Unfortunately, that’s not the only avenue for Trump to try and sneak in.
The current order of presidential succession is:
- Vice President
- Speaker of the House
- President Pro Tempore of the Senate
- Secretary of State
We’ve already noted that the first is clearly off the table. However, the rest are not.
The Constitution doesn’t actually set requirements for speaker of the House, saying only, “The House of Representatives shall chuse their Speaker and other Officers; and shall have the sole Power of Impeachment.”
While every speaker has been a member of the House, it’s clear that there’s nothing requiring that to be the case. Hence, a Republican House could simply elect Trump as speaker, and then elevate him after both the president and the vice president resigned to pave his return to power.
A plain text reading of the Constitution makes this absolutely possible, though the courts would have to wrestle with the intent of both the 12th and the 22nd Amendments—which collectively make clear that really, two presidential terms is enough. But in this case, Trump wouldn’t be elected to the presidency, he would be elevated to the job.
The more practical impediment to this scenario is that two people would now need to surrender their chances to be president of the United States so fucking Trump could continue trashing the country and the world. People don’t want that, not even Republicans, and that’s before Trump’s policies really do a number on our economy.
Not to mention, those two people will both have gone through a grueling national campaign, won the votes of tens of millions, and for what? To quit and give it all up right after taking the oath to office?
Moving down the list, president pro tempore of the Senate is supposed to preside over the Senate in the absence of the vice president (hence the Latin “for the time being”), which the Constitution pretends is the president of the Senate (and in practice, just means a tie-breaking vote if necessary).
Like the House speaker, the Constitution doesn’t provide any qualifications for the role, so by tradition, the majority party picks its oldest member for the mostly ceremonial position. It is currently Iowa Sen. Chuck Grassley.
Presumably a Republican Senate could pick Trump as president pro tempore. But that would require the House to be in Republican hands as well, otherwise a Democratic speaker would ascend to the top. At that point, assuming the whole Republican Party is singing from the same choir book, it would just be easier for the House to make him speaker.
And finally, there’s that secretary of state job. Imagine Trump as secretary of state? Dear god. In any case, it would be a short-term charade. But now you’re talking about four people giving up their chance to be president—the elected president, the elected vice president, the speaker of the House, and the president pro tempore of the Senate. Trump may be deluded enough to think that many people would clear the path for him, but that would fly in the face of human nature. A not-president Trump would have zero leverage over an actual president.
And of course, that’s still assuming that the effort would survive legal challenges based on the 22nd Amendment. After all, it’s clear what the framers of that amendment intended—to prevent another Franklin D. Roosevelt from happening. That is, to prevent another president from entrenching themselves in the Oval Office.
But it does say a lot about Trump that rather than focus on the job at hand, he’s obsessing over a third term. He wants power for the sake of power itself, jealous of despots like Russia’s Vladimir Putin and North Korea’s Kim Jong Un. Of course, he’s going to indulge in these sorts of fantasies.
Reprinted with permission from Daily Kos.
