Copyright Foreign Policy
U.S. President Donald Trump has been toying with running for a third term. Sometimes he claims to be joking, other times he says he wouldn’t do it, and yet on different occasions he says directly that he is really considering the option. By this point in his second term, anyone who doesn’t take Trump seriously when he says something has not been paying attention. His most consistent tactic is to do and say things in broad daylight. Once they are out there, they become part of the national conversation. Once they are out there, nobody can say he didn’t warn them. The more that he talks about something, the greater the likelihood that it becomes normalized. The main problem for Trump is that he can’t run for a third term. The U.S. Constitution prevents him from doing so. The 22nd Amendment, passed by Congress in 1947 and ratified by the states in 1951, strictly prohibits presidents from serving for more than two terms. That was the point of the amendment. Plain and simple. The only exception is a person who has served less than two years of a term after taking over from their predecessor; they are granted the ability to run two more times. The text, which is straightforward, is worth revisiting verbatim. It says: “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.” Despite the clarity of the language and the intention behind the amendment, if Trump wants to move forward, he won’t be deterred. Whether he directly challenges the legitimacy of the amendment or finds some technical trick to work around the prohibition—such as running as vice president then taking over when the winner resigns—the strength of the amendment, and the entire constitutional system that supports it, would face its greatest challenge. So, what is the 22nd Amendment, and how did it come about in the first place? The amendment was passed and ratified in response to President Franklin Roosevelt, the Democratic architect of the New Deal, who was elected four times (in 1932, 1936, 1940, and 1944)—to the frustration of Republicans. Until the time that Roosevelt defeated Republican President Herbert Hoover in 1932, there had a been an enduring norm that presidents would never serve for more than two terms. The norm was not part of the Constitution. After considerable debate, the country’s founders had decided that they would not impose any term limit on the presidency. There was not much support behind the idea, and the Constitution left the ultimate decision up to voters. President George Washington established the norm. Despite his immense popularity, Washington decided that it was important to distinguish U.S. democracy from monarchical systems. Though voters retained the right to reelect him, Washington argued that there should be self-imposed limits to how long a person would remain in power. It was healthier for the political system, he believed, if presidents turned over their authority and allowed voters to choose a new voice to lead the country. Presidents James Madison and Thomas Jefferson agreed and entrenched this norm in the early years of the republic. Jefferson, according to the political scientist Michael Korzi, “saw little distinction between a long-serving executive in an elective position and a hereditary monarch.” The norm faced numerous challenges before the 1940s. There were continued efforts on Capitol Hill to propose legislation that would term-limit the presidency. None of them succeeded. The most serious challenge to the norm in the 19th century, according to historian Stephen Stathis, took place shortly after voters reelected Republican President Ulysses S. Grant in 1872. Grant’s supporters were emboldened by his success against opponent Horace Greeley and engaged in private conversations about the possibility of Grant running again. But after Republicans suffered a devastating midterm in 1874, enthusiasm for another campaign diminished. In 1880, Grant did attempt to secure the Republican nomination for a third run but fell short in his effort. And then in 1908, President Theodore Roosvelt decided that he would not run after his two terms, given the norm, though he would run as a third-party candidate in 1912. The true test of the norm took place with President Franklin D. Roosevelt. During the Great Depression and World War II, FDR proved to be an enormously popular president. Americans loved to gather around their radios in the living room to hear his “fireside chats,” and many of them hung photographs of him over their mantles. Although there were powerful segments of society that vehemently opposed his policies, particularly business leaders who detested his expansion of government authority over corporations, sizable majorities of voters kept coming back to him. Roosevelt justified running for a third term in 1940 and for a fourth term in 1944 based on the argument that in a time of emergency, it was better for the nation to maintain continuity of leadership. “Don’t swap horses in the middle of the stream,” Democrats counseled the electorate. Republicans were livid. Some went so far as to compare FDR to the leaders of dictatorial regimes in Europe, against which the United States had gone to war. In 1940, Republican candidate Wendell Willkie endorsed a two-term limit amendment. The Republican Party included proposals for a constitutional amendment that created a term limit on their planks in 1940 and 1944. After FDR died from a stroke in 1945 and Harry Truman became president, Republicans accelerated their effort. Crucial were the 1946 midterms, when Republicans recaptured control of Congress for the first time since they’d lost it in 1932. Through campaigns that centered on high prices, a fragile economy, and broader problems with the postwar reconversion, Republicans gained control of the House and Senate. Their victory was a blow to FDR’s New Deal coalition. While the economy was the central concern in most campaigns, the new Republican majorities quickly seized on the opportunity to propose a constitutional amendment that would ensure that Truman would only have limited time in office. The interest in constitutional amendments was not a surprise. After all, this was an era, as Harvard historian Jill Lepore has written in her book We the People, when elected officials still adhered to the founder’s belief that the Constitution should change and adapt as the nation faced new challenges. “From the vantage point of conservatives, though,” Lepore wrote, “Article V [of the Constitution] looked somewhat promising. Between 1937 and 1960, even as the New Deal became more frequently established—embraced not only by Harry S. Truman but also by Dwight D. Eisenhower—an emerging conservative counterrevolution attempted to limit federal power, especially as exercised by the executive and judicial branches.” Shortly after the midterms, Republicans started committee deliberations over the proposal. State legislatures controlled by Republicans had been building support for an amendment for several few years. In February, the House started to debate two proposals. Illinois Republican Rep. Everett Dirksen championed an amendment that would create one six-year term. Michigan Republican Rep. Earl Michener backed an amendment limiting presidents to two four-year terms. Rep. Emanuel Celler, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, favored Dirksen’s proposal, arguing that one long term would be “more productive than two four-year terms … since all bargaining and compromise frequently resorted to with hope of re-election would be eliminated.” The Judiciary Committee ultimately backed Michener’s proposal. Despite Democrats blasting the proposal as a vindictive attack on what Roosevelt had achieved, the House passed the amendment by a vote of 285 to 121. Some 47 Democrats, most of whom were from the South, joined all the Republicans in voting in favor of the amendment. On March 10, the Senate rejected a constitutional convention to settle the matter. Instead, Ohio Sen. Robert Taft, the titular leader of the Republican Party, and Maryland Democrat Millard Tydings worked out a compromise that passed the Senate on March 12. The final version extended the limitation to 10 years for an individual who had served less than two years following his predecessor’s term ending, as was the case with Truman (who was exempted). Massachusetts Democrat John McCormack, the future speaker of the House, warned: “What we are doing today is not legislating for ourselves but acting in a manner binding upon future generations of Americans after we are dead and gone.” But Democrats such as McCormack were not in control. After the Senate sent its revised version to the House, it passed 81 to 29 on March 21, 1947. Ratification took a few years, given that Democrats were reluctant to support this measure. States with large Republican majorities moved relatively fast. Southern took more time to crack, given that the region was a one-party town. But the more that President Truman took a proactive stand toward promoting civil rights legislation, the greater that opposition to the amendment within the region started to break down. The 37th state, Minnesota, made its decision on Feb. 27, 1951, providing the amendment the numbers needed for victory. Since the ratification, numerous presidents have expressed frustration with the fact that they could not run for a third term. Presidents Bill Clinton and Barack Obama shared their belief with reporters that they could have won another term if they had been allowed to do so. In the mid-1980s, some of President Ronald Reagan’s supporters more seriously talked about the possibility of running for a third term. Reagan himself publicly expressed his opposition to the 22nd Amendment—“I think it should be changed because I think it’s only democratic for the people to be able to vote for someone as many times as they want”—but accepted that under the existing Constitution, he could not. Michigan Republican Rep. Guy Vander Jagt proposed legislation to repeal the amendment, but it failed. Vander Jagt characterized the amendment as “a needless constraint on presidential power and the popular will.” Reagan himself noted, “That’s what’s wrong with the 22nd Amendment. The minute the ’84 election is over, everybody starts saying ‘what are we going to do in ’88.” Reagan did not, however, do anything while he was in office to promote legislation that would overturn an amendment that he felt was “born out of vengeance against Franklin Roosevelt.” Yet despite all the grumbling, presidents from both major parties and their supporters accepted the legitimacy of the amendment, its meaning, and the idea that it had to be followed. Presidents mused about what they would do if the amendment did not exist, and legislative allies proposed laws trying to overturn it, but all of them lived by the law of the land. In 2025, the United States is in a very different place. The 22nd Amendment might be the most important test for the state of the constitutional order under Trump 2.0. There is another option, however. Rather than waiting for such a crisis point to take place, congressional Republicans could demonstrate that they are still interested in being a party of law and order, and that they are serious about shouldering the responsibilities of governing and protecting the Constitution. They could state clearly and unambiguously to the president from their own party that they will not stand by him if he decides to try violating the law. But thus far, there is little evidence that anyone in the Republican Party is willing to take such a stand.
