Trump wants third term despite legal ban? Latin Americans can teach him how | Opinion
When President Trump said that he is “not joking” about running for a third term, legal experts agreed that it would be unconstitutional. But the U.S. president may try to find creative ways to circumvent his term limits in Latin America’s recent history.
To be sure, the U.S. Constitution’s 22nd Amendment, ratified in 1951, says that “no person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”
Still, Trump, 78, has floated several times the idea of running again. In addition to saying he was not joking about it, he said in a March 30 interview with NBC News that “there are methods which you could do it.”
Having covered Latin American politics for several decades, I know something about re-election “methods.” Here are some of the most frequent re-election ploys I’ve seen in the region:
▪ The Hugo Chavez way. Venezuela’s autocratic demagogue held a 2007 referendum to re-write the Constitution. After it failed to pass, Chavez convened a second referendum in 2009 to extend his term limits, citing a constitutional article granting powers to the people. This time, he won the referendum, and changed the constitution to be able to stay in power indefinitely.
Could Trump change the constitution? It would be very difficult: He would need two-third majorities in both the House and the Senate, or two-thirds of the states. Trump right now has a razor thin majority in Congress, and could lose the House in next year’s mid-term elections.
▪ The Evo Morales way. Bolivia’s former populist autocrat, who ruled Bolivia from 2006 to 2019, held several plebiscites to change the Constitution. After losing a 2016 referendum to allow him to run for a fourth term, Morales cited an Inter-American Convention on Human Rights article stating that no person can be denied his human right to run for public office.
His loyalist-packed Constitutional Tribunal ruled in his favor, and he was allowed to run for a fourth term in 2019. Trump could try something like that, although the Supreme Court would be unlikely to go along with it.
▪ The Cristina Kirchner way. Argentina’s former populist president, after winning a second term in 2011, ran for vice-president in the 2019 elections. She picked her former chief of staff, Alberto Fernandez, as the presidential candidate, hoping to rule from behind the scenes, or perhaps hoping that he would resign after winning the elections. The ticket won the 2019 elections, but Fernandez stayed in office.
Trump may not be able to run for vice-president, because the U.S. Constitution’s 12th Amendment doesn’t allow it. But the U.S. president could use a variation of the Kirchner gambit.
Juan Carlos Planas, a constitutional expert who teaches at St. Thomas University, told me that Trump could be appointed speaker of the House, and have his presidential and vice-presidential candidates resign after winning the 2028 elections.
The Constitution doesn’t explicitly ban former presidents from being picked as House speakers, and the line of succession would leave him in the No. 1 spot — if the president and vice-president agreed to resign.
To support his case for being appointed House speaker, Trump could argue that the 22nd Amendment says that a president can’t “be elected” for a third term, but doesn’t say that a president cannot “serve” for a third term.
My hunch is that Trump will not be allowed to run again, but that he will keep talking about his re-election until the end of his term.
He needs to keep his re-election story alive to distract attention from his administration’s failures, including the fall of the stock market since he took office, and the “Signalgate” national security scandal. And he also needs to keep the third-term story alive to avoid becoming a lame-duck president, and risking his own party distancing itself from his policies.
So my humble prediction is that Trump will try hard, but not succeed, in running for a new term — and that he will keep us talking about it until his last day in office.
Don’t miss the “Oppenheimer Presenta” TV show on Sundays at 9 pm E.T. on CNN en Español. Blog: andresoppenheimer.com
