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When Donald Trump on Sunday expressed interest in serving a third presidential term, and denied that he was joking, he was not speaking on the subject for the first time. He has, as the New York Times notes, “floated the idea frequently.” Only one year into his first term, he observed that the Chinese communist party had eliminated term limits to allow President Xi to continue indefinitely in office. Trump declared himself impressed and added that the United States might consider following suit: “Maybe we’ll have to give that a shot someday.”
The reporting and commentary turned immediately to the question of whether Trump could find a way around the evident constitutional problem: the 22nd Amendment. We do not think there is any lawful method for achieving a third term other than a constitutional amendment. But there is no reason to doubt that, in this presidency so focused on the aggrandizement of presidential power, Trump would like to keep the third-term possibility on the table.
Scholars have noted that the 22nd Amendment “is quite unique among 20th Century constitutional modifications inasmuch as other amendments [were] designed either to increase public control over the elective process (17th and 20th Amendments) or to enhance the scope and power of the central government (16th Amendment).” By contrast, the 22nd Amendment both “narrow[ed] the scope of electoral choice” and expressed “hostility to enhanced executive power.”
Opponents of the amendment argued that any such limit was undemocratic and further weakened the presidency. In 1959, only 8 years after ratification, 21 of 26 prominent scholars of the presidency surveyed by Congress, including James MacGregor Burns and Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., supported repeal of the amendment. A leading expert on this history, Martin B. Gold, has emphasized these scholars’ concern with the effect of term limits in “diminishing the presidency by imposing, as a matter of certainty, lame-duck status on a second-term incumbent.”
Trump is echoing these arguments against term limits and probably does hope to rekindle the debate about the 22nd Amendment’s wisdom. Whatever other political purposes may lie behind these remarks—such as diverting attention from the Signal chat breach—the White House affirmed that Trump answered journalists’ questions about a third term “honestly and candidly,” even as top Republicans in Congress are trying to downplay the incident as unserious.
As the candidate who declared when accepting his party’s nomination in 2016 that he “alone” could fix the nation’s problems, it stands to reason that he would resist being hobbled by lame-duck status. Consider also his claim—both in his 2025 inaugural address and in his March address to Congress this year—that he was “saved by God to make America great again.”
Given Trump’s emphasis on the crisis facing the country that only he with divine approbation can redress, he would surely applaud George Washington, who in 1788 told Lafayette that he saw “no propriety in precluding ourselves from the services of any man, who on some great emergency, shall be deemed, universally, most capable of serving the Public.” By 1796 Washington had revised his view. Trump may see the “great emergency” before the country he was destined to save as calling for a different choice.
Yet there is a question whether the president’s third-term musings are prudent. His administration is defending an unprecedented number of challenges to his already sweeping and often legally dubious claims of executive authority. That defense has included aggressive administration confrontations with courts and insinuations of defiance of their orders. Any discussion now of a third term—much less via “methods” other than a constitutional amendment for achieving it—can only add to the Justice Department’s burdens in selling the judiciary on Trump’s conception of presidential power.