President-elect Donald Trump is already toying with the idea of pursuing a third term in office — in direct violation of the U.S. Constitution.
MSNBC host Jonathan Lemire tweeted Wednesday that during a recent meeting with the House Republican Conference, Trump suggested that his second term in the White House may not be his last. This would contradict the 22nd Amendment to the Constitution, which prohibits anyone who has been elected twice from running for a third time.
"I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say, 'He’s so good we’ve got to figure something else out,'" Trump said.
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The 22nd Amendment is explicit in its imposition of term limits on U.S. presidents. When George Washington served out his second term as the first president, he expressed that it was improper for anyone to serve more than two four-year terms in the nation's highest office, and that others who served after him should follow suit.
In 1799, Connecticut Governor John Trumbull — who was military secretary during the Revolutionary War — asked Washington to run for president a third time. Washington responded that he feared if he did so, he would be "charged... with concealed ambition," and that he had "ardent wishes to pass through the vale of life in [retirement], undisturbed in the remnant of the days I have to sojourn here."
But former President Franklin Delano Roosevelt broke with the two-term tradition, and won two more terms as president in 1940 and 1944, before dying in office in 1945 just months after he was elected to his fourth term. While Roosevelt was immensely popular after guiding the nation through the Great Depression and World War II and successfully argued that America needed stable leadership to get through the war, Congress sought to prevent future presidents from remaining in office for more than two terms by passing the 22nd Amendment through both chambers in 1947.
If Trump were to seek a third term, he would have to repeal the 22nd Amendment, which requires both two-thirds of the House and Senate along with two-thirds of state legislatures. The only amendment in U.S. history to have been repealed is the 18th Amendment, which established prohibition of alcohol. And that repeal only came about with the ratification of the 21st Amendment in 1933.
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It's unlikely that an anti-22nd Amendment repeal effort would succeed, particularly with enough time to grant the 78 year-old Trump the ability to run for a third time. The most recent 27th Amendment took 202 years to ratify after it was first proposed in 1790, which concerned pay increases for members of Congress.
Still, some Trump loyalists have posited the repeal of the 22nd Amendment. Earlier this year, writer Peter Tonguette of the American Conservative — one of the 100-plus advisory groups supporting Project 2025 — proposed that Trump should be free to run for a third term, and framed it as a pro-democracy initiative.
""If, by 2028, voters feel Trump has done a poor job, they can pick another candidate; but if they feel he has delivered on his promises, why should they be denied the freedom to choose him once more?" Tonguette argued. "As with Prohibition, it is simply a matter of finding the will to get rid of a bad idea that needlessly limits Americans’ freedom."
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