Hypothetically-speaking, what would happen if convicted felon Donald Trump were assassinated in-between his election earlier this month and his inauguration in January? There’ve been at least two assassination attempts so far, so it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that somebody will have another go at some point1.
Hello, Secret Service agents! Thanks for visiting my blog. I assume I managed to get the right combination of keywords to hit your watchlist. Just to be clear, this is an entirely hypothetical discussion. I know that you’ve not always been the smartest about telling fiction from reality. But as you’ll see, I’m just using the recent assassination attempts as a framing device to talk about the history of the succession of the position of President-Elect. Please don’t shoot me.
If the US President dies in office – and this happens around 18% of the time2 – the Vice-President becomes President. But right now, convicted felon Donald Trump isn’t President. He’s President-Elect, which is a term used distinctly from President in the US Constitution and other documents.
It turns out that the answer is that the Vice-President-Elect becomes President at the inauguration. This boring answer came to us through three different Constitutional Amendments, each with its own interesting tale.
The Twelfth Amendment (1804) mostly existed to reform the Electoral College. Prior to the adoption of the Twelfth Amendment, the Electoral College members each cast two ballots to vote for the President and Vice-President, but didn’t label which ballot was which position: the runner-up became Vice-President. The electors would carefully and strategically have one of their number cast a vote for a third-party candidate to ensure the person they wanted to be Vice-President didn’t tie with the person they wanted to be President. Around the start of the 19th century this resulted in several occasions on which the President and Vice-President had been bitter rivals but were now forced to work together3.
While fixing that, the Twelfth Amendment also saw fit to specify what would happen if between the election and the inauguration the President-Elect died: that the House of Representatives could choose a replacement one (by two-thirds majority), or else it’d be the Vice-President. Interesting that it wasn’t automatically the Vice-President, though!
The Twentieth Amendment (1933) was written mostly with the intention of reducing the “lame duck” period. Here in the UK, once we elect somebody, they take power pretty-much immediately. But in the US, an election in November traditionally resulted in a new President being inaugurated almost half a year later, in March. So the Twentieth Amendment reduced this by a couple of months to January, which is where it is now.
In an era of high-speed road, rail, and air travel and digital telecommunications even waiting from November to January seems a little silly, though. In any case, a secondary feature of the Twentieth Amendment was that it removed the rule about the House of Representatives getting to try to pick a replacement President first, saying that they’d just fall-back on the Vice-President in the first instance. Sorted.
Just 23 days later, the new rule almost needed to be used, except that Franklin D. Roosevelt’s would-be assassin Giuseppe Zangara missed his tricky shot.
The Twentieth Amendment (1967) aimed to fix rules-lawyering. The constitution originally said that f the President is removed from office, dies, resigns, or is otherwise unable to use his powers and fulfil his duties, then those powers and duties go to the Vice-President.
Note the wording there. The constitution said that if a President died, their their duties and powers would go to the Vice-President. Not the Presidency itself. You’d have a Vice-President, acting as President, who wasn’t actually a President. And that might not matter 99% of the time… but it’s the edge cases that get you.[foonote]Looking for some rules-lawyering? Okay: what about rules on Presidential term limits? You can’t have more than two terms as President, but what if you’ve had a term as Vice-President but acting with Presidential powers after the President died? Can you still have two terms? This is the kind of constitutional craziness that munchkin US history scholars get off on.[/footnote]
It also insisted that if there’s no Vice-President, you’ve got to get one. You’d think it was obvious that if the office of Vice-President exists in part to provide a “backup” President in case, y’know, the nearly one-in-five chance that the President dies… that a Vice-President who finds themselves suddenly the President would probably want to have one!
But no: 18 Presidents4 served without a Vice-President for at least some of their term: four of them never had a Vice-President. That includes 17th President Andrew Johnson, who you’d think would have known better. Johnson was Vice-President under Abraham Lincoln until, only a month after the inauguration, Lincoln was assassinated, putting Johnson in change of the country. And he never had a Vice-President of his own. He served only barely shy of the full four years without one.
Anyway; that was a long meander through the history of the Constitution of a country I don’t even live in, to circle around a question that doesn’t matter. The thought randomly came to me while I was waiting for the traffic lights at the roadworks outside my house to change. And now I know the answer.
Very hypothetically, of course.
Footnotes
1 My personal headcanon is that the would-be assassins are time travellers from the future, Chrononauts-style, trying to flip a linchpin and bring about a stable future in which he wasn’t elected. I don’t know whether or not that makes Elon Musk one of the competing time travellers, but you could conceivably believe that he’s Squa Tront in disguise, couldn’t you?
2 The US has had 45 presidents, of whom eight have died during their time in office. Of those eight, four – half! – were assassinated! It’s a weird job. 8 ÷ 45 ≈ 18%.
3 If you’re familiar with Hamilton, you’ll recall its characterisation of the election of 1800 with President Thomas Jefferson dismissing his Vice-President Aaron Burr after a close competition for the seat of President which was eventually settled when Alexander Hamilton instructed Federalist party members in the House of Representatives to back Jefferson over Burr. The election result really did happen like that – it seems that whichever Federalist in the Electoral College that was supposed to throw away their second vote failed to do so! – but it’s not true that he was kicked-out by Jefferson: in fact, he served his full four years as Vice-President, although Jefferson tried to keep him as far from actual power as possible and didn’t nominate him as his running-mate in 1804. Oh, and in 1807 Jefferson had Burr arrested for treason, claiming that Burr was trying to capture part of the South-West of North America and force it to secede and form his own country: the accusation didn’t stick, but it ruined Burr’s already-faltering political career. Anyway, that’s a diversion.
4 17 different people, but that’s not how we could Presidents apparently.
But, if Joe Biden was to die before the inauguration (let’s hope not), Kamala Harris would become the 47th president and Donald Trump would become #48 – which would invalidate a lot of his merch.