Trump Eyes a Third Term

President Trump’s declaration on Sunday that a “lot of people want” him to run for a third term and that “there are methods which you could do it” appears crosswise with the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution. Mr. Trump added that he is “focused on the current” but that he “likes working” and is “not joking” about serving a third term. He seems to be thinking that he could run for vice president, then have the 48th president quit.The idea seems to be to get around the 22nd Amendment which ordains that “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” That was ratified in 1951 after FDR was elected to four terms. NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Mr. Trump if he could evade that restriction by enlisting Vice President Vance to run for president and “then pass the baton to you.” Mr. Trump mused “that’s one” way it might work but that “there are others.”Mr. Trump didn’t elaborate, but he might have been alluding to the fact that the Constitution can be amended. Stephen Bannon has already vowed that Mr. Trump could “run and win again in 2028.” Getting “elected” a third time, though, is clearly blocked by the plain language of the 22nd amendment. Amendments require a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate and then ratification by three quarters of the states.Those requirements do not daunt Congressman Andy Ogles. In January he introduced an amendment to the effect that “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than three times, nor be elected to any additional term after being elected to two consecutive terms.” The lawmaker reasoned that Mr. Trump has proven himself to be the “only figure in modern history capable of reversing our nation’s decay.”These columns, as our long suffering readers know, enjoy parsing the Constitution as much as anyone. We fail, though, to see, as we put it recently, the logic of an amendment that opens the way “only for Mr. Trump.” We do support the repeal of the 22nd Amendment for everyone. Washington’s decision to eschew a third term was voluntary. The question of term limits was mooted at the Constitutional Convention, which rejected imposing limits.President Obama grumbled — and Reagan ruminated — about the two-term limit. It’s hard to imagine either of them contemplating the kind of switcheroo of which Mr. Trump is apparently thinking. Then again, too, it’s not clear, at least to us, that Mr. Trump could, at the rate he’s going, win a third term, even if a way around the Constitution were to be found. Right now the 47th president seems bent on scaring and dividing Americans.Which, in our view as a paper that endorsed the 47th president, is not a formula for talking about, or even imagining, a third term. Mr. Trump came into his second term with a dream hand — to extend his tax cuts, free the economy, boost growth, create jobs, end some wars, build a peace-through-strength military, and even, in our view, restore the constitutional dollar. Right now, his team is having a hard time running a chat group.Which brings us back to the Founders. They were divided on term limits for the president. Jefferson wrote a hilarious letter to John Adams in the fall of 1787, i.e., while the Constitution was out for ratification. He confessed that there are things in it that “stagger all my dispositions” and complained that “their President seems a bad edition of a Polish king.” This, given that “he may be reelected from 4. years to 4. years for life.”Mr. Trump’s real motivation in obsessing over a third term could be to evade the “lame duck” status all second-term presidents have faced since the 22nd Amendment. As the columnist E.J. Dionne noted, the impossibility of a third term for Mr. Trump means that “ambitious senators, House members and governors will be contemplating their own futures in a world without him.” What commander in chief would savor that prospect?

Trump Eyes a Third Term

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