'Here’s the deal': Legal experts debunk MAGA’s 'nutbar fantasy'

02 January

The last U.S. president who served more than two terms was Democrat Franklin Delano Roosevelt, who was serving his fourth term when he died in office on April 12, 1945 at the age of 63. That day, Vice President Harry Truman was sworn in as president.

Post-FDR, U.S. presidents have been limited two terms — which can be either consecutive or nonconsecutive — thanks to the U.S. Constitution's 22nd Amendment, which was approved by Congress in 1947, sent to state legislatures for ratification, and adopted in 1951.

However, President-elect Donald Trump and ally Steve Bannon have implied that he might stay in office after January 20, 2029 and serve a third term. Slate journalists Dahlia Lithwick and Mark Joseph Stern tackle this subject in a Dear Jurisprudence column published in late December.

"Here's the deal," Lithwick explains. "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.' So that seems pretty cut-and-dried."

Lithwick adds that "some nutbars" on the far right "have suggested, with no legal authority, that the 22nd Amendment refers only to two consecutive terms."

Trump is the first president since Democrat Grover Cleveland in the 1880s/1890s to win two nonconsecutive terms. Voted out of office in 2020, Trump won a second nonconsecutive term when he narrowly defeated Vice President Kamala Harris in 2024.

Lithwick writes, "So, while I worry about many, many things, including whether there could be a free and fair election in 2028, I do not worry that Donald Trump, even if he controls both houses of Congress and the Court, can just gobble up the 22nd Amendment and say it applies to all presidents except for him."

Stern agrees, saying, "I just want to add that I think they're doing this because Trump is a strongman, and part of the aura of a strongman is that there can be no conceivable limit on his power. So the idea that he's a lame duck as soon as he reenters office, it’s anathema to all that Trumpism stands for. They have to perpetuate this fantasy that there's some way around the 22nd Amendment."

Read the full Slate column at this link.

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