Threepeat: Donald Trump for President? Again?

The Kansas City Chiefs, routed in the Super Bowl by Philadelphia, missed getting an historic “three-peat.” Will Donald Trump try for a three-peat of his own?

If you listen to some of his deluded followers – and cynical toadies – he has already racked up three election victories, but one was stolen. He still hasn’t served three terms, though. And the Constitution says he can’t. But he has mused repeatedly about a third term. Some people have started to wonder if the Constitution will be enough to stop him – or even stop him from trying.

A third term has, of course, been done before – which was why the Constitution was amended to keep it from happening again. In 1947, after the last of Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s four electoral victories (he died just weeks into his fourth term) a conservative Congress mustered the necessary two-thirds vote to put the 22nd amendment before the states. Three-fourths of the state’s legislatures had to approve. The final votes of that three-fourths came through in 1951. Ever since, two terms have been all a chief executive gets.

The 22nd amendment 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. But this Article shall not apply to any person holding the office of President when this Article was proposed by the Congress, and shall not prevent any person who may be holding the office of President, or acting as President, during the term within which this Article becomes operative from holding the office of President or acting as President during the remainder of such term.”

That’s pretty cut-and-dried. But then, a lot of things that seemed cut-and-dried not long ago now seem pretty iffy. Clearly, Trump and people close to him are willing to ignore the Constitution and/or change its meaning to suit their ideologies. (Change its meaning to suit their ideologies? Who do they think they are – the Supreme Court?)

Should talk about a third term be taken seriously? “Just eight days after he won a second term, Mr. Trump — whose supporters attacked the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021, in an effort to prevent Joseph R. Biden Jr.’s victory from being certified — mused about whether he could have a third presidential term, which is barred by the Constitution,” Maggie Haberman has written in The New York Times.

“Since then,” she has written, “he has floated the idea frequently. In public, he couches the notion of staying in office beyond two terms as a humorous aside. In private, Mr. Trump has told advisers that it is just one of his myriad diversions to grab attention and aggravate Democrats, according to people familiar with his comments.”

Is this all really a diversion? Does he mean what he says about a third term? Trump supporters and enablers, explaining their votes or encouraging others to join the crusade, are always telling people to ignore his most vicious or weirdest rants. They want you to believe it when he promises to bring down the cost of groceries and gasoline, and his tariffs won’t cost you a cent. But not when he says some of that disturbing other stuff. Basically, they’re saying aww, he doesn’t mean it — rather like the owner of a large, unfriendly dog that has just lunged at your leg: “He’s really a sweetheart.” Right. This isn’t reassuring when a dog owner says it and certainly not when it’s said about our 47th President. First off, how bizarre is it when someone explains supporting – or asks you to support – a political leader on the grounds that you can’t trust a word he says?

But at the very least, Mr. Trump’s a gifted entertainer with a keen instinct for what will play well with his target audience. What if a lot of people claim to like the idea of a three-peat? What if Trump himself decides he likes the idea? The fact that he and some of his supporters are already talking about it publicly means that non-believers shouldn’t dismiss the idea that he will at least try.

“Even when Mr. Trump presents something as a joke,” Haberman writes, “the idea he suggests often becomes socialized by his supporters, both those in office and in the right-wing media. The concept then often takes on more weight, including for Mr. Trump.”

It evidently has started taking on weight in Texas. Haberman writes: “’People are already talking about changing the 22nd Amendment so he can serve a third term,’ Dan Patrick, the lieutenant governor of Texas, posted on X on Jan. 25, a message that Mr. Trump elevated on his own platform, Truth Social. ‘If this pace and success keep up for 4 years, and there is no reason it won’t, most Americans really won’t want him to leave.’”

Assuming Trump is still alive and doesn’t show too many Biden-like signs of decline by 2028, will “most Americans” get their wish? Probably not – but these days, who knows? How might he or the MAGA zealots or cynics try to grab a third term? Look at some of the possibilities:

• The most straightforward and obvious way would be to formally amend the Constitution, either repealing or limiting the scope of the 22nd Amendment. This isn’t likely to happen. It would require two-thirds votes in both houses of Congress – which even with a couple more years of extreme gerrymandering would be hard to get – and approval by legislatures or conventions in three-fourths of the states – which would also be all but impossible to achieve in the next four years.
• Get the Supreme Court to, in effect, amend the Constitution on its own. Anyone who thinks that as formal amendment has become harder and harder to achieve, the court hasn’t basically been doing this for decades hasn’t been paying attention.

Consider a few more-or-less legal possibilities: Does the 22nd Amendment explicitly say a two-term President can’t run in a primary? No. Does it explicitly say a two-term President can’t be nominated by a major party? No. Does it explicitly say a two-term President can’t appear on the ballot? No. Nor does it explicitly prevent a two-term President from running for Vice-president and then stepping in when a newly elected President steps out.

Would Congress – this Congress – or the courts – this Supreme Court – want to “disenfranchise” all those would-be Trump voters? Not likely. Even though the clear purpose of the 22nd Amendment – like the clear purpose of the 14th Amendment’s section 3, which the Court basically wrote out of the Constitution last year, citing disenfranchisement as one of its rationales – letting a candidate be banned in some states but not in others “could nullify the votes of millions and change the election result” — is to keep people from electing somebody they want to vote for. There would be no point in passing Constitutional language to keep out a candidate who didn’t stand a chance. The 14th Amendment was written to keep former Confederate traitors from holding the offices to which they would otherwise have been elected. The 22nd Amendment was passed to keep another Franklin Delano Roosevelt from winning four terms. Anti-democratic? Sure. Just like the Electoral College. And the U.S. Senate. And partisan gerrymandering, an issue that the Court has said is not “justiciable?”

If a two-term President was on the ballot and gained a majority of the votes, or at least enough votes in the right places to win an Electoral College majority – which is all that Trump has ever done – what then? Would anyone dare say he couldn’t serve? That would probably touch off at least a Civil War Lite: no massive armies in blue and grey – or blue and red — but definitely acts of violence and lasting bitterness, a 21st-century Lost Cause. Who’s going to risk that?

Or Trump and his supporters could just ignore the courts and Constitution, as the administration seems to be doing right now. Who’s gonna stop them? When the Supreme Court ruled against one of Trump’s favorite presidents, Andrew Jackson, who wanted to – and did – send the Cherokees out of Georgia on their “Trail of Tears,” Jackson allegedly said Chief Justice “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.” It turns out that Jackson probably didn’t say that, but the quote has a disconcerting resonance today. Courts can’t enforce orders by themselves. The historic Brown decision that ended legal segregation in public schools would have been a dead letter if then-President Dwight Eisenhower hadn’t federalized the Arkansas National Guard and sent the 101st Airborne into Little Rock so that nine black kids could safely go to Central High School.

Of course, using the military to enforce the Constitution, as defined by the courts, isn’t the only option. Would MAGA military leaders be willing to help Trump violate the Constitution? That sounds like a question you might ask about a classic banana republic facing a coup. But it may be our new reality. Pass the bananas.