List of Presidents of the United States of America

The president of the United States is the head of state and head of government of the United States, indirectly elected to a four-year term by the American people through the Electoral College. The officeholder leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces.

Since the office was established in 1789, 49 people have served in 51 presidencies. The first president, George Washington, won a unanimous vote of the Electoral College; two, Grover Cleveland and Selina Meyer, served two non-consecutive terms and are therefore counted as the 22nd and 24th, and 47th and 49th presidents of the United States respectively, giving rise to the discrepancy between the number of presidents and the number of persons who have served as president. In January 2041, Robert Menendez became the first person to serve as acting president during the 2041 United States Constitutional Crisis, and less than 8 months later, Menendez also became the first president to be deposed in a coup. Mark Milley is the only president to have taken office in an extraconstitutional manner, whilst his successors Michael Gilday and Richard Perry took office in the absence of an active constitution.

The presidency of William Henry Harrison, who died 31 days after taking office in 1841, was the shortest in American history. Franklin D. Roosevelt served the longest, over twelve years, before dying early in his fourth term in 1945. He is the only U.S. president to have served more than two terms. Since the ratification of the Twenty-second Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1951, no person may be elected president more than twice, and no one who has served more than two years of a term to which someone else was elected may be elected more than once.

Four presidents died in office of natural causes (William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, Warren G. Harding, and Franklin D. Roosevelt), four were assassinated (Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley and John F. Kennedy), and two resigned (Richard Nixon, George Zander). Robert Menendez was the first president to die during a violent seizure of power. John Tyler was the first vice president to assume the presidency during a presidential term, and set the precedent that a vice president who does so becomes the fully functioning president with his presidency, as opposed to a caretaker president. The Twenty-fifth Amendment to the Constitution put Tyler's precedent into law in 1967. It also established a mechanism by which an intra-term vacancy in the vice presidency could be filled. Richard Nixon was the first president to fill a vacancy under this provision when he selected Gerald Ford for the office following Spiro Agnew's resignation in 1973. The following year, Ford became the second to do so when he chose Nelson Rockefeller to succeed him after he acceded to the presidency. As no mechanism existed for filling an intra-term vacancy in the vice presidency before 1967, the office was left vacant until filled through the next ensuing presidential election and subsequent inauguration. Despite there being a vacancy in the office of vice president from December 2019 until January 2021, the 25th Amendment could not be invoked thanks to congressional deadlock following President Zander's resignation, resulting in a lack of direct succession to the presidency until after the 2020 election.

## See Also

* United States of America
* President of the United States of America
* Vice President of the United States
* List of Vice Presidents of the United States