{"id":101504,"date":"2025-05-12T11:18:57","date_gmt":"2025-05-12T15:18:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/?p=101504"},"modified":"2025-05-12T17:19:52","modified_gmt":"2025-05-12T21:19:52","slug":"opinion-pascal-lupien-discusses-how-trump-could-circumvent-the-two-term-limit","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/2025\/05\/opinion-pascal-lupien-discusses-how-trump-could-circumvent-the-two-term-limit\/","title":{"rendered":"OPINION: Pascal Lupien discusses how Trump could circumvent the two-term limit"},"content":{"rendered":"

This piece written by Pascal Lupien, Associate Professor of Political Science at Brock University, originally appeared in The Conversation<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n

United States President Donald Trump has repeatedly floated the idea of\u00a0remaining in office after his second term ends in 2029. Since the\u00a022nd Amendment of the U.S. Constitution\u00a0was ratified in 1951, no U.S. president has challenged the two-term limit it established.<\/p>\n

However, attempts to circumvent constitutional term limits are not unprecedented elsewhere.<\/p>\n

Virtually every country in Latin America has\u00a0enshrined constitutional term limits\u00a0as a safeguard against tyranny. These rules vary: some allow only a single term, some permit two, while others enable non-consecutive re-election. Yet several presidents have managed to defy these provisions.<\/p>\n

Recent examples include\u00a0Daniel Ortega in Nicaragua,\u00a0Hugo Ch\u00e1vez in Venezuela,\u00a0Evo Morales in Bolivia,\u00a0Rafael Correa in Ecuador\u00a0and\u00a0Nayib Bukele in El Salvador.<\/p>\n

Although the institutional norms and political cultures of these countries differ from those of the U.S., examining how term limits have been dismantled offers valuable insights into how any similar efforts by Trump might unfold.<\/p>\n

How presidents have overstayed their term<\/strong><\/p>\n

The most common tactic is for presidents to first ensure their political party in the legislature is fully subservient to them, and then leverage a loyal majority to amend the Constitution \u2014\u00a0a move that has already been initiated in the U.S.<\/p>\n

Ortega\u00a0and\u00a0Correa\u00a0successfully used their legislative majorities to pass constitutional amendments that eliminated term limits in Nicaragua and Ecuador.<\/p>\n

Whether\u00a0Trump has achieved the same level of unwavering loyalty among Republicans is debatable, but getting amendments through the U.S. Congress is significantly more difficult.\u00a0The process requires a two-thirds majority vote in both houses, followed by ratification from three-quarters of state legislatures.<\/p>\n

In contrast,\u00a0Nicaragua\u2019s constitution can be amended with a 60 per cent majority\u00a0and, as in Ecuador, sub-national jurisdictions have no say in the matter.<\/p>\n

Another crucial step involves co-opting or capturing the judiciary. In Bolivia,\u00a0Morales achieved a controversial third term in 2014\u00a0supported by a partisan Constitutional Tribunal. More recently, El Salvador\u2019s Bukele secured a 2021 Supreme Court ruling (from judges he appointed) allowing him to seek immediate re-election in 2024,\u00a0despite a constitutional prohibition on consecutive terms.<\/p>\n

We have seen a\u00a0worrying pattern\u00a0of\u00a0subservience to Trump\u00a0by the U.S. Supreme Court. The limits of this deference are\u00a0increasingly uncertain.<\/p>\n

Securing popular support<\/strong><\/p>\n

Some presidents have turned to plebiscites to legitimize constitutional tampering by appealing directly to the electorate and framing the move as a democratic exercise. Ch\u00e1vez employed this strategy in Venezuela, winning a\u00a02009 referendum to abolish term limits.<\/p>\n

The absence of a national referendum mechanism in the U.S. \u2014 where popular consultations are organized at the sub-national (state) level \u2014 limits the options available to a president seeking to remove term limits through this type of populist ploy.<\/p>\n

Related to this, populist presidents who have successfully circumvented term limits have typically done so while enjoying extraordinarily high levels of public support.<\/p>\n

Correa maintained approval ratings near 70 per cent\u00a0during much of his presidency, while independent polls have put\u00a0Bukele\u2019s support at well over 80 per cent. Both, along with Morales and Ch\u00e1vez, leveraged their popularity to\u00a0justify constitutional changes through legislative and judicial channels, framing their actions as carrying out the will of the people.<\/p>\n

In contrast, Trump\u2019s approval ratings have consistently remained far lower. Currently, his\u00a0favourability sits in the low 40s, making any attempt to claim a broad popular mandate for a third term both dubious and precarious.<\/p>\n

The military matters<\/strong><\/p>\n

Due to inevitable opposition,\u00a0military support is central to any leader\u2019s attempt to defy the constitution. In much of Latin America, the military is highly politicized, and armed forces have historically been\u00a0shaped by doctrines of internal control rather than external defence.<\/p>\n

Rooted in Cold War-era national security ideologies, this orientation casts domestic dissenters (\u201csocialists,\u201d Indigenous movements, unionists) as internal enemies, legitimizing repression as a patriotic duty.<\/p>\n

In some countries, military oaths reflect this politicization. In both Nicaragua and\u00a0Venezuela, these oaths increasingly emphasize loyalty to the president or ruling party and their revolutionary legacy, undermining institutional neutrality.<\/p>\n

By contrast,\u00a0in the U.S., military personnel swear an oath to defend the Constitution, not the president. While they must follow orders, these must align with constitutional and legal boundaries.<\/p>\n

The absence of a tradition of using soldiers against American citizens and an institutional culture of constitutional loyalty and political neutrality may, at least in principle, provide some protection against the authoritarian overreach that has allowed certain Latin American presidents to remain in power indefinitely.<\/p>\n

But a substantial portion of the\u00a0U.S. armed forces leans politically to the right, like their counterparts in Latin America, raising concerns that partisan sympathies within the military could influence its response to a constitutional crisis.<\/p>\n

Furthermore, the increasing use of non-military security forces \u2014 such as\u00a0local police\u00a0and Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) \u2014 against civilians demonstrates that the state has a range of instruments at its disposal for exercising control.<\/p>\n

The U.S. government\u2019s use of ICE is reminiscent of how governments in countries like\u00a0Venezuela\u00a0and\u00a0Nicaragua\u00a0have used\u00a0police and paramilitary units loyal to the president with impunity to suppress dissent.<\/p>\n

The perils of complacency<\/strong><\/p>\n

Many in the West still hold on to the belief that constitutional erosion is something that only happens in the Global South. Some believe that\u00a0American institutions are uniquely resilient and therefore capable of withstanding any attempt to subvert the Constitution.<\/p>\n

For much of U.S. history, this confidence may have been justified, but today, it\u2019s not only complacent but dangerous.<\/p>\n

The strength of democratic institutions depends on the political will to defend them. Time will tell if the barriers that exist in the U.S. are strong enough to withstand the pressures now being placed upon them. What is clear is that relying on increasingly tenuous institutional resilience or historical exceptionalism is no substitute for vigilance and active defence of democratic norms.<\/p>\n

\"The<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Pascal Lupien, Associate Professor of Political Science at Brock University, recently published a piece in The Conversation about lessons from Latin American history that offer insight into how President Trump could remain in office after his second term ends. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":101511,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6,38],"tags":[14482,522,11954,5512],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101504"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=101504"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101504\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":101513,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/101504\/revisions\/101513"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/101511"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=101504"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=101504"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/brocku.ca\/brock-news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=101504"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}