TRUMP: A THREE-TERMER?

 

Jamais deux sans trois?

America may be going toward an imperial presidency.

Till Franklin Delano Roosevelt, all US presidents had one or two terms, no more. FDR was the only one to get four terms, one after the other, at an important period in American history, between the Great Depression and the last months of the Second World War.

It was only after his death that the American Constitution was modified, limiting the number of terms to a maximum of two. Donald Trump, the President-elect, is presently preparing to take office. He has a firm control over the White House (the Executive branch) and of most of the Senate and of the House of representatives (the Legislative branch), while a majority of the Supreme Court judges (the Judiciary branch) are on his side, plus a sizable part of the press. The Democrats are clearly on the defensive, at least for the time being.

The first half of his term, from the month of January to the midterm elections, will be very imporant. Things should go very fast, since he had four years, a sizable amount of time, to dream about his wants and plan his eventual return to office.

Nobody but Trump can know what is inside his mind, but there's certainly a good chance that he will seek to centralize as much power as possible in his hands. An obvious way to do it would be to increase the lenght of his stay, over the current maximum of eight years. Vladimir Poutine, who he admires, did exactly the same thing.

A Constitution is a piece of paper. It may be modified, of course, and the US Constitution was amended many times over the years, the decades and the centuries since the founding of the American Republic. A republic can certainly evolve through time. France is now on the fifth version of the original, the one that was a carnage.

Historians have divided the history of the Roman Empire into three great parts: Etruscan kings (monarchy), elected consuls (republic) and emperors (a quite uneven lot, a mix of excellent, mediocre and just plain awful). English-speaking settlement in North America have followed so far a remarkably parallel path, from a series of British kings to a line of elected presidents, and then to...

Qui vivra verra.

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PLUS:  @charles.millar3 (X-Twitter)