A week after returning to the White House, President Donald Trump floated the idea that the two-term limit for American Presidents could be negotiable. The development came while Trump spoke to House Republicans during their annual retreat in Florida. “I have raised a lot of money for the next race that I assume I cannot use for myself, but I am not 100% sure because I do not know… I think I am not allowed to run again. I am not sure. Am I allowed to run again?”, Trump said, according to a report by The New York Times. Over the years, the President has repeatedly mused about serving more than two terms. For instance, in November 2024, he told his Republican Party colleagues, “I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say, ‘He’s so good we’ve got to figure something else out.’” The 22nd Amendment to the US Constitution, which was ratified in 1951, says that no one can be elected more than twice as President. It was enacted after President Franklin D Roosevelt had been elected four consecutive times, from 1932 to 1944. Here is a look at the amendment, its history, and how it was finally enacted. The 22nd Amendment According to the amendment, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice”. Moreover, if a Vice President becomes President during the term of their predecessor, they can still serve two full terms as long as they serve less than half of their predecessor’s remaining term. For example, Lyndon Johnson, who was John F Kennedy’s Vice President, first served less than two years — 14 months — as President after Kennedy was assassinated in 1963. The next year, Johnson won the Presidential election himself. Although he did not run in 1968, Johnson could have served four more years if he had and won, taking his total time in office to a little over nine years. The amendment was put in place as there “was a concern about entrenching power in a kinglike manner,” Kimberly Wehle, who teaches constitutional law at the University of Baltimore, told The NYT. The two-term tradition Setting term limits on a President was a hotly debated subject among the framers of the US Constitution. Most of them did not favour a term limit as they wanted the country to have flexibility during an emergency, according to a report by NPR. However, this did not settle the debate about the issue. Just 14 years after the Constitution came into effect, the first proposal to limit presidential tenure was introduced in Congress in 1803. The resolution was rejected in a vote. Then, “in 1824 and again in 1826, the Senate approved resolutions calling for a two-term limit, but they died in the House,” Stephen W Stathis, an analyst in American history, wrote in his paper, ‘The Twenty-Second Amendment: A Practical Remedy or Partisan Maneuver?’ (1990). While Congress was mulling over the subject of term limits, a tradition was established which would last more than a century-and-a-half. “In 1796, President George Washington's refusal to run for a third term “received such official sanction that it became an almost unwritten law, virtually as sacred as any provision of the Constitution.”” Subsequently, Thomas Jefferson, who served as President between 1801 and 1809, also refused to run for a third term. This further promoted the two-term tradition. It only came under threat in 1872 after the reelection of Ulysses S Grant to a second term. Grant’s allies and some newspapers began to push the idea of his candidacy for a third term. This became a topic of discussion, especially during the 1894 midterm elections. “Grant did not comment on his intentions, which — combined with a lagging economy, white resistance to Reconstruction in the South and ethics scandals — led to Republicans losing a whopping 94 seats that year,” the NPR report said. As a result, Grant subsequently announced that he would not accept a nomination “if it were tendered”. In 1875, the House of Representatives passed a resolution which sought to promote the two-term tradition. It said that breaking the tradition would be "unwise, unpatriotic, and fraught with peril to our free institutions.” However, the resolution did not legally bar a president from trying to get reelected for a third term. Notably, Grant attempted to run for President again in 1880 but failed. Tradition becomes law Roosevelt was the first (and remains the only) President to break the two-term norm. He was in office between 1933 and 1945 — the year he died. His supporters argued that he had to be the President for four consecutive times due to “the need for consistent leadership through World War II,” the NPR report said. Once Roosevelt passed away, the momentum to enact a constitutional amendment to limit a President to two terms intensified (Republicans did call for such an amendment in 1940 and 1944 but as they failed to defeat Roosevelt in polls, their efforts went in vain). In 1946, Republicans regained Congress, and one of their first “priorities was a constitutional amendment to prevent any future president from gaining a Roosevelt-type hold on the White House,” Stathis wrote. While some Democrats saw the amendment as an insult to Roosevelt’s legacy, others were concerned that the President had set a dangerous precedent. They argued that a term limit was “not an undemocratic restraint upon the popular will, but a democratic restraint upon any future, dangerously ambitious demagogue,” according to Stathis. In 1947, the 22nd Amendment was finally passed by Congress after lengthy negotiations, especially over whether the limit should be two four-year terms or one six-year term. This prohibited Presidents from being elected for a third time.
