‘No one shall be elected to the office of president more than twice’

Brussels – Donald Trump, president of the United States for the second time, barely a month after taking office is already, evidently, working on a third term. “Can’t a third term of mine be done?” he asked yesterday (Feb. 20), replying, “I’m not sure.”

However, the US Constitution, which, let us recall, was passed two years before the French Revolution, is quite clear on the matter: “No person shall be elected to the office of President more than twice,” states the Twenty-second Amendment, passed in 1951. The second part of the first paragraph reiterates the concept, saying that “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 President more than once.” Therefore, if a vice president becomes president and holds the office for over two years, they may run for office only once. The concept is clear: the US Constitution rejects the idea of an extended, too-long stay in power.

On this point, the original version of the Constitution (of 1787) established only a four-year tenure, with no limit on how many times a person could run for office, until the case of Franklin D. Roosevelt, who had four presidential terms and died in office on Apr. 12, 1945, at the beginning of his fourth term, having first entered the White House in 1933. US politics had debated for some time about placing a limit on reelections and turning the tradition launched by George Washington of not holding office more than twice into a rule. The solution was the 22nd Amendment.