Trump’s Third Term
The pundits are having a difficult time understanding how President Trump would fulfill his expressed desire to serve a third term as president. Some of them have fallen back on the possibility that he is joking and just trolling his critics. Others have come up with unlikely scenarios for achieving a third term. For example, one commentator asked Trump whether he planned to have J.D. Vance run as president, with Trump as his vice-presidential running mate. Under this scenario, Vance would resign immediately after the election, thereby elevating Trump to the presidency.
However, there are two problems with that scenario:
One, Trump couldn’t trust Vance to fulfill his part of the bargain. What if Vance changed his mind and decided to remain as president? That would leave Trump as vice-president for the next four years. He wouldn’t be very happy as vice-president. That’s the position that Vice President Garner said “is not worth a bucket of warm spit.”
Two, the 12th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution prohibits someone from being a vice-presidential candidate if he is ineligible to serve as president. The 22nd Amendment, which prohibits someone from being elected president more than twice, renders Trump ineligible to run as president.
Trumpsters have raised the possibility of a constitutional amendment that would enable Trump to seek a third term. The problem there is that such an amendment would have to be passed by a two-thirds vote in both houses of Congress and then ratified by three-fourths of the states. That simply is not going to happen and certainly not within the next three years.
So, does all this mean that Trump is simply joshing about a third term as president in an effort to provoke and upset his detractors?
Not necessarily. There is another path to a third term for Trump, a very viable path, one that he might well be pondering.
Ever since the Constitution called the federal government into existence, there has been a big potential flaw in the system. Under our system of government, the j
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
