A third Trump term? What would Archie Bunker think?

Las Vegas Review-Journal, Las Vegas Review-Journal on Mar 26, 2025

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A classic episode of “All in the Family” features Archie Bunker taunting his wife’s liberal cousin, Maude, by denouncing Franklin Delano Roosevelt. As Maude begins to fume, Edith begs her husband to stop and notes that “his whole family was for Roosevelt.” Archie brushes it off: “That was for two terms, but that was it. We didn’t know the guy was gonna hang on to the job like a pope.”

FDR, of course, is the only American president to serve more than two terms. He died in office five months after voters elected him in 1944 for a fourth time. His refusal to follow tradition later led congressional Republicans to propose the 22nd Amendment, prohibiting presidents from being elected more than twice. The measure passed, with some Democratic support, and was ratified by the requisite number of states, becoming enshrined in the Constitution in 1951.

Fast forward more than 70 years, and some Republicans have now gotten over their aversion to presidents who ignore the two-term precedent set by George Washington. There is open talk in MAGA circles of President Donald Trump serving a third four-year stint in the Oval Office. But the creative theory on how this may be accomplished is impractical and legally dubious, while nullifying the constitutional provision is virtually impossible politically.

Repealing the 22nd Amendment would require the backing of 37 state legislatures, meaning it would need support in some solidly blue jurisdictions. Suffice it to say there would be no political appetite in those places for allowing Trump on the ballot in 2028. “Practically, a snowball in hell has a better chance of survival than the passage of the repeal of the 22nd Amendment,” former federal prosecutor Gene Rossi told Newsweek. “It will not happen.”

Not surprisingly, ardent backers of the current president have concocted a creative method of potentially getting around the amendment: Have Trump run as the GOP vice presidential candidate and then assume the Oval Office when the winning Republican at the top of the ticket resigns shortly after the inauguration. But Carl Tobias, a former UNLV law professor now at the University of Richmond, told Newsweek that the arguments undergirding the legality of such a move are “not very persuasive, and judges may reject it.”

Trump himself has previously stated that he “wouldn’t be in favor” of changing the 22nd Amendment. “I intend to serve four years and do a great job,” he told Time magazine last April.

Let’s hope he means it. Trump will turn 82 in 2028. He should respect the Constitution’s two-term limit and focus his attention over the next three-plus years on delivering prosperity for the American people rather than trying, in the immortal words of Archie Bunker, “to hang on to the job like a pope.”