Donald Trump Is the 45th and 47th President, and It's Become a Meme on the Right

Donald Trump is about to be president yet again, and for only the second time in history, a president has been elected to non-consecutive terms in office. That means that, while Barack Obama and Donald Trump will have been in office for the same number of years, Obama is the 44th president, and Trump will be both the 45th president and the 47th.

The fact that Trump is serving non-consecutive terms has become a rallying cry among his supporters, who use the meme 45-47 to signify their support for him. Here's what we know about what those numbers mean.

45-47 is a meme that Trump supporters used even before he won reelection.

“As soon as I lift my hand from the Bible as your 47th president, I will seal the border, shut down the invasion of millions and millions of people coming into our country, and we will start an energy revolution,” Trump said at a New Hampshire rally over the summer of 2024.

While it might seem fairly straightforward to describe Trump as the 47th president, it actually comes with more trouble than you might expect. That's mostly because Trump refused to accept the results of the 2020 election, and many of his supporters claimed that Donald Trump was still president even while Joe Biden occupied the oval office. Trump accepting that Biden was the 46th president in order to claim the number 47 suggests, however tacitly, that he did lose in 2020.

There are some, though, who likely take the 45-47 meme to mean that Trump was also the 46th president, although there is no factual basis for that claim, and it wouldn't make sense on several levels. First, if Trump had been reelected in 2020, he would simply still be the 45th president. Second, no president is allowed to serve three terms in office, so if Trump had won last time, he couldn't now be sworn in as president.

Although much of the narrative around Trump's 2024 election victory suggested that he won in a commanding fashion, and it's true that he won by a healthier margin than he did in 2016, Trump is coming in with a very narrow congressional majority. He is apparently planning to sign a number of executive orders early on in his term, although it's unclear which of these will be symbolic and which will actually change the way government works.

Even as his supporters rally to his side, the question of what exactly Trump's second term will look like remains somewhat up in the air. We know some of what he's planning, and many of the people who will be staffing his administration, but we don't know exactly how much he'll get done. For many who support him, though, the fact that he's back in the White House is all that really matters.