A Trump 3rd Term? – The American Spectator | USA News and PoliticsThe American Spectator

The headlines speak plainly.

As with this one from the Washington Times: “Trump ‘not joking’ about a 3rd term, says there are ways around constitutional limits.”

The story reports:

President Trump is flirting with running for a third term — no joke.The move would put him on a collision course with the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, which limits a person from being elected president more than twice.“There are methods which you could do it, as you know,” Mr. Trump said in an interview with NBC News.

Whether he runs or not is a decision that will come down the political road.

For now, the moment would be at hand to recall that the only man in American history who accomplished running — and winning — a third (and fourth!) term was the Democrats’ presidential idol — President Franklin D. Roosevelt. (RELATED: The Left’s Hypocrisy About the ‘Imperial Presidency’)

FDR, elected in two previous landslides (1932 and 1936) in the middle of the Great Depression, was actually being pressured to run for an unprecedented third term. For a reason. While the Depression had slowly begun to fade, serious threats were beginning to shadow the peace that had been achieved since the end of what was known in the day as the “Great War.” (Known today as World War I).

In Germany and Italy, iron-fisted dictators Adolf Hitler and Benito Mussolini were becoming serious threats to that peace. Biographer Ted Morgan writes that as 1940 and the presidential election dawned:

The war was on in Europe, and FDR told (Secretary of the Interior Harold) Ickes that he could not rule out the possibility of a third term. …. The war was a reason to seek a third term, as was saving the New Deal from destruction.

In a January 1940 lunch with his treasury secretary, the president said: “I do not want to run unless between now and the convention things get very, very much worse in Europe.”

Alas, as history records, things did get “very, very much worse in Europe.” And, as FDR and the world realized a year after the 1940 election — on Dec. 7, 1941 — that would apply to events in the Pacific as well. On that day, the Japanese, Germany’s ally, attacked Pearl Harbor, wreaking havoc on the Pacific fleet of the United States Navy.

All of this comes to mind as it becomes clear that President Trump, as with his long-ago predecessor FDR, is indeed thinking about running for a third term. Not to mention that today’s world, not unlike the world FDR was watching in 1940, is in turmoil, with war in fact having broken out in Europe and the Middle East as well.

All of which means America’s adversaries, now as then, need to understand clearly that there is a strong president sitting in the American White House. And he will act to prevent the world from descending into a global war.

American history has been around the historical block. And there is a reason that the monuments in Washington, D.C. celebrate the presidencies of a Washington, Jefferson, Jackson, Lincoln, the two Roosevelts, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, Reagan, and others. That reason is that all of these presidents understood the importance of what Reagan called “Peace Through Strength.”

It is a sad but seemingly eternal fact of life that at any given time in history there are bad actors out there who are determined to do bad things. Whether a Hitler, Mussolini, Ho Chi Minh, Castro, Saddam Hussein, an Iranian mullah or other; the human experience is that there is always the possibility of someone somewhere on the planet with bad ideas and evil in mind, all too willing to pursue the sheerest evil to satisfy their own blood lust.

And in today’s world, it falls to a decidedly strong American president to lead the world through that chaos.

The hard fact in today’s world is that there was peace in the first Trump presidency — and the hell that was the Ukraine–Russia war or the invasion of Hamas began when Trump was succeeded by a weak, frail president who was seen as exactly that by America’s enemies.

When it comes to the third term of a president? Yes, there is the 22nd amendment. But history records that in fact there are ways to deal with that. One way in particular.

Lost in the historical mists is the hard reality that once upon a time, there was a segment of Americans who viscerally opposed Americans drinking alcohol. They mustered the political support to enact the 18th Amendment to the Constitution.

The very first sentence in that Amendment reads:

After one year from the ratification of this article the manufacture, sale, or transportation of intoxicating liquors within, the importation thereof into, or the exportation thereof from the United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof for beverage purposes is hereby prohibited.

Which is to say, war was declared on the sale of alcohol. The results were not good; the nation descended into the hell of Prohibition. By 1933, the 21st Amendment was ratified, overturning the 18th Amendment.

Which is to say, there is nothing standing in the way of repealing the 22nd Amendment that has kept popular presidents of both parties with names like Eisenhower and Reagan (Republicans) and Clinton and Obama (Democrats) from running a third time.

It is, characteristically, President Trump who has the political courage to stand up and suggest he is in fact, like FDR, interested in running for a third term. Which in turn set off a national conversation on how to accomplish this.

Can this be done? The very first thing required is for the country to start having the discussion about how to make it possible for presidents to run for a third term.

And Trump has gotten that started.

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