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Philip Blumel: A third term for President Trump. Hi, I’m Philip Liel. Welcome to No Uncertain Terms, the official podcast of the Term Limits Movement. This is episode number 261, published on April 7th, 2025.
Stacey Selleck: Your sanctuary from Partisan Politics.
Philip Blumel: President Trump only a couple months into his second term said in a March 30th interview with NBC news that there are methods for him to serve a third term in the White House.
Philip Blumel: Now he suggested this before, usually in apparent Jest to rile his opponents and maybe that’s what’s happening here. I’m not going to get all up in arms about this unless we see an actual move in that direction. But the exchange on NBC news is a good excuse to take a look at the 22nd Amendment and see why any attempt at a third term is highly unlikely to succeed. But this review won’t be purely academic. According to a 2020 study, about a third of all term limited presidents globally have tried to remain in power after the end of their maximum allowed tenure. So we’ll come back to that idea later in this podcast. First, let’s hear how the mainstream media is talking about this story. His report from Good Morning America on ABC.
George: Latest on President Trump, considering running for a third term an idea that would require violating the constitution’s term limits for presidents. Let’s go back to our chief White House correspondent Mary Bruce. Good morning again, Mary.
Mary: Good morning again Michael. Well this would defy the Constitution, but President Trump this morning says he is considering his options to serve another term in the White House in a phone interview with NBC Trump saying, “there are methods which you could do it,” including possibly urging his vice President, JD Vance to run and then C power back to Trump, the President saying that’s one method, but there are others too. Now, when asked to clarify, Trump doubling down saying, I’m not joking, but then adding it is far too early to think about it and overnight on Air Force one, the president declined to answer when asked point blank if he is planning to leave office in 2029.
Mary: Now this is an idea that Trump and his allies have publicly been toying with for months, but a third term of course would violate the 22nd amendment of the Constitution, which says no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice. Now he could of course try to amend the Constitution, but that is a very tall order, George.
George: But Mary, even that vice presidential idea would violate the Constitution. The 12th amendment to the Constitution says that no one can run for vice president who’s in ineligible to run for president.
Mary: Yeah, George, there are a lot of legal questions about how the president would practically try to do this, but again, this is an idea that he simply is not willing to let go of.
Philip Blumel: Next, let’s look at the 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution. No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice. Now that seems to be pretty simple in ironclad, you can only be elected twice. That means no third term, right? Of course, that was the intent of the amendment. The two term or eight year tradition goes all the way back to the constitutional convention where the founders argued about the issue quite a bit. Actually in terms of time, there is no other issue which took up more discussion time at the 1787 convention than the length and number of terms the president should have.
Philip Blumel: The most common term limits suggested at that time were a single six or seven term limit or a two term eight year limit. Despite all that debating, they never did agree on a proper term limit and there was not one included in the original draft of the constitution in the state conventions created to ratify the new US constitution.
Philip Blumel: However, Virginia, North Carolina, New York, all officially called for constitutional amendments to include eight year presidential term limits. But these did not make it into what we now call the Bill of Rights. In any case, the two term eight year limit, one out as an informal term limits tradition right outta the box. President George Washington famously relinquished power after two terms, president after president explicitly pointed to this tradition and not running for third terms, including Thomas Jefferson, Andrew Jackson.
Philip Blumel: Now when some presidents flirted with the idea of running for a third term, their trial balloons were shot down on a bipartisan basis by an angry public according to Martin B Gold, in his exceptional book, the 22nd Amendment and the Limits of Presidential Tenure, the initial challenges to the two term tradition came from the Republican Party with President Ulysses S. Grant in 1876 and 1880 also and Theodore Roosevelt in 1912.
Philip Blumel: In each case, Democrats led the defense of the two term tradition as gold points out talk of a third term for Grant Roiled. The midterm election grant failed to renounce interest stoking democratic turnout in 1874. This midterm election disrupted Republican dominance of Congress that had existed since the end of the Civil War. In 1875, representative Williams Springer, democrat of Illinois led the house in passing a resolution, declaring a third term bid to be contrary to the public interest. It was the consolidation of power by FDR due to the Depression and the World War that led to his violating this tradition.
Philip Blumel: The backlash to his three plus terms led to the hearings and then to adoption of the 22nd Amendment. So back to Trump, NBC News asked Trump what these methods might be to get around the apparent two term maximum. The interviewer was asked about a scenario in which vice President, JD Vance could run for president with Trump as VP and then resigned passing the role to Trump.
Philip Blumel: After all, Trump wouldn’t technically be elected to a third term. Is this a loophole in the 22nd Amendment? First, let’s get this outta the way. The idea is quite fanciful. Is JD Vance going to win a presidential campaign which is no walkthrough the park and then simply hand off power to someone else? An 82-year-old de boot are the voters who would naturally be in on this ploy. Go along with this no way, but let’s just say this occurs. The Supreme Court would naturally read the amendment in its technical wording and of course looking at its intent. Paul Gowder, a professor at Northwestern Pritzker School of Law has written that the loophole argument is pretty implausible.
Philip Blumel: The argument defeats the clear intent of the 22nd Amendment. Gowder said the guy who wrote the text that got adopted as the amendment stated on the record, his understanding of what Congress was trying to do in drafting it to, “prevent a man’s deliberately using the office of president in order to perpetuate himself in office. That is for more than two terms.”
Philip Blumel: And if you believe in the loophole, not only does it mean that Trump could have more than two terms, it means that Trump could be president for life just so long as he could keep finding people to occupy the top of the ticket. Alright, thank you Professor Gowder. Now let’s go out on a limb here and suggest that two thirds of the Congress and three quarters of the states that adopted the 22nd Amendment had nothing of the sort in mind. There could be no reading of history or the hearings that would lead an honest person to suggest the intent of the amendment was to do anything else but to codify the longstanding two term eight year term limit that had existed since the founding of the country.
Philip Blumel: Interestingly, I’ve seen a lot of such cases on the local level where politicians will attempt some gimmicky way to get around their eight year tournament. For instance, in 2016 I wrote an amicus brief in a case in Palm Beach Gardens, Florida where a city council member faced a two term limit. He resigned early from his second term in order to run for a third term saying that the partial one didn’t count. The court was not convinced. In fact, the courts hardly ever fall for these pranks.
Philip Blumel: I’m sure there’s such cases out there, but I can’t think of one off the top of my head and I’ve been around this block before. Term limits are intended to limit terms, it sounds absurd to say it. Of course it’s hard to convince a court otherwise. I love how Professor Gowder put it. He said it’s improper to take a provision that obviously means no more than two terms and cook up a bond villain esque scheme to interpret to mean yes more than two terms.
Speaker 5: This is a public summit announcement.
Philip Blumel: Okay, let’s take a quick break from this discussion to look back at candidate Donald Trump in 2016 who is seen as a supporter of Term limits, at least for Congress. He has repeated his support for the idea since both before and after teasing the press about running for a third term as president.
President Donald Trump: But there’s another major announcement I’m going to make today as part of our pledge to drain the swamp. If I’m elected president, I will push for a constitutional amendment to impose term limits on all members of Congress. They’ve been talking about that for years. Decades of failure in Washington and decades of special interest dealing must and will come to an end. And remember, by the time this ends, I will have spent over a hundred million dollars on my campaign. Hillary spent nothing. She gets all her money from the special interest and donors and my interest is you. My interest is you.
Philip Blumel: Since then, we haven’t seen much action on either promoting correctional Term limits or amending presidential Term limits.
Philip Blumel: Okay, now can the 22nd Amendment be repealed or amended? After all, there is such a bill circulating in the US house right now introduced by representative Andy Ogles of Tennessee who would allow a third term. You know, amending the constitution is a big lift and it’s that way on purpose. As you know, if you’re a regular listener, US Term limits is trying to pass an amendment, constitutional amendment to limit the terms of the Congress. We have over 150 pledge supporters and co-sponsors in the Congress and 11 states have officially applied for an amendment proposing convention to write one.
Philip Blumel: We have been working on this strategy for about eight years. It’s not easy even for an amendment that has support from big majorities of Democrats, republicans, and independents. Now imagine running a similar campaign to weaken term limits. You can ignore those scary memes you’re hearing about this.
Philip Blumel: No one, including Representative Ogles believes this is going to happen. His bill has zero co-sponsors as of today, and this is why I’m not so alarmed by the President hinting at a third term, it ain’t happening in the USA. Now abroad is a different story. The desire of politicians to fight, to obtain, to expand and to clinging to power is universal. So I go back to the study I started this podcast with, according to an article in The Atlantic in 2020 by Tim Horley, Anne Meng, and Mila Versteeg, titled The World is Experiencing a New Form of Autocracy. About a third of all term limited presidents globally have tried to remain in power after the end of their maximum allowed tenure.
Philip Blumel: Such heads of state, according to the study that fueled this article, have resorted to four main strategies to evade their term limits. Amending the Constitution to amend the term limits is the most popular one. A good example here is Rwanda’s Paul Kagame. He claimed that popular demand justified putting the constitutional change back on the ballot and it turned out that 99% of voters wanted to weaken the term limit. Of course, no one anywhere believed it was a fair election.
Philip Blumel: In China where elections are a capitalist extravagance, Xi Jinping relied solely on the popular demand argument and simply got the rubber stamp legislature to rubber stamp the constitutional change. Now Xi is in, forever. The second most popular way to evade term limits is to use the blank slate strategy of updating the current constitution completely and replacing it with a new one that just happens not to have term limits. According to the article, this is one of the methods employed by former Sudanese president Omar Al Bashir. Until his ouster last year after taking power in 1989, he oversaw not one but two entirely new constitutions and thus remained in power for decades without formally violating Term limits. Each time there’s a new constitution, his term started over again.
Philip Blumel: We see this one used by municipalities in the United States who use the charter review process to update their cities or counties organizing documents, that just so happens to leave out Term limits in the new version or just like in Sudan, use the new charter as an excuse to start their clock over. A third popular approach internationally is to challenge the legality of constitutional Term limits in court. And of course we see that in the US also. This strategy is particularly popular in Latin America. In Nicaragua to give one example, Daniel Ortega argued that to limits violated his constitutional rights, the court agreed.
Philip Blumel: Latin American judges tend to defer to their authoritarian codes. Who knows what would happen to them if they don’t. The last strategy is the most similar to the alleged Trump loophole ploy. The perp in this case will choose a faithful agent, a successor whom the current president can control.
Philip Blumel: Then the president can step down nominally, but retain power until they can legally reclaim it if possible, or have accumulated enough power to start ignoring the to its law. The poster child for this approach is Vladimir Putin facing an eight year tournament. Putin stepped down in 2008 from the presidency temporarily and turned over the reigns to Dmitri Medvedev while Putin served as Prime Minister until he could run again in 2012. Now, observers agree that Putin, not Medvedev was calling the shots during that four year period.
Philip Blumel: For one thing, during that period, the Constitution was amended to permit two six year terms, not four, and returning to power in 2012, Putin claimed his tournament clock had started over and he could legally serve another 12 years until 2024. Well, it’s 2025 now and he’s still there. Putin’s power is such that the Constitution was amended to accommodate him yet again, fascinating article, highly recommended, and you know, it makes you appreciate living in the United States because even as we rail against our uncompetitive congressional elections, we have a constitutional remedy that we’re using to fix it. And even as our most powerful politicians make noise seriously or otherwise about refusing to leave office, we can sleep securely at night knowing that we still live in a real democracy under the rule of law.
Stacey Selleck: Like the show you can help by subscribing and leaving a five star review on both Apple and Spotify. It’s free.
Philip Blumel: Thanks for joining us for another episode of No Uncertain Terms. The Term Limits Convention bills are moving through the state legislatures. This could be a breakthrough year for the Term Limits movement. To check on the status of the Term Limits convention resolution, your state, go to termlimits.com/take action. There you will see if it has been introduced and where it stands in the committee process on its way to the floor vote. If there’s action to take, you’ll see a take action button by your state. Click it. This will give you the opportunity to send a message to the most relevant legislators, urging them to support the legislation they have to know you are watching. That’s termlimits.com/take action.
Philip Blumel: If your state has already passed the Term limits, convention resolution, or the bill’s not been introduced in your state, you can still help. Please consider making a contribution to US term limits. It’s our aim to hit the reset button on the US Congress and you can help. Go to termlimits.com/donate, termlimits.com/donate. Thanks. We’ll be back next week.
Stacey Selleck: Find us on most social media at US Term limits like us on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Instagram, and now LinkedIn.
Speaker 7: USTL.