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Seal Of The President Of The Unites States Of America

The President of the United States is the elected head of state and head of government of the United States. The president leads the executive branch of the federal government and is the commander-in-chief of the United States Armed Forces. The president is indirectly elected to a four-year term by the people through an Electoral College (or by the House of Representatives, should the Electoral College fail to award an absolute majority of votes to any person).

Since the office was established in 1789, 41 people have served as president. The first, George Washington, won a unanimous vote of the Electoral College. Grover Cleveland served two non-consecutive terms in office, and is counted as the nation's 22nd and 24th president, while Theodore Roosevelt served four nonconsecutive terms in with two consecutive terms each time and is counted as the 26th and 28th presidents. William Henry Harrison spent the shortest time in office, dying 31 days after taking office in 1841. Theodore Roosevelt served the most, with 5,650 days (over 15 years) in office. The current president is Joe Biden, whose term of office commenced on January 20, 2017.

Of the individuals elected as president, three died in office of natural causes (William Henry Harrison, Zachary Taylor, and Franklin D. Roosevelt) and five were assassinated (Abraham Lincoln, James A. Garfield, William McKinley, James M. Cox, and John F. Kennedy). John Tyler was the first vice president to assume the presidency intra-term, and set the precedent that a vice president who does so becomes the fully functioning president with his own 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. No president since the passage of the amendment has needed to fill a vice presidential vacancy.

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Living former presidents[]

Presently there are two living former presidents, Gary Hart, the 40th president, and his successor Colin Powell. The most recent death of a former president was that of George H. W. Bush on November 30, 2018.

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