The Reason Why U.S. Presidents Can Only Serve 2 Terms — and Whether Trump Could Actually Get Around It

Only one United States president has ever been elected to serve more than two terms in office: Franklin Delano Roosevelt.

After the extenuating circumstances of the Great Depression and the looming threat of World War II led to Roosevelt’s 12-year grip on the Oval Office, the U.S. government was forced to take a closer look at making term limits official.

Prior to Roosevelt, the two-term limit had been merely a tradition, upheld by even the most popular presidents. George Washington set the precedent in 1796 when he declined to run for a third term, leaving office with a historic address aimed at reminding the American people of the importance of national unity, but also political checks and balances.

After Thomas Jefferson and James Madison followed suit, the two-term limit became a well-respected tradition. Many political scholars credit Jefferson with further emphasizing the importance of making a leader’s time in power quantifiably finite.

“Jefferson saw little distinction between a long-serving executive in an elective position and a hereditary monarch,” historian Michael Korzi wrote in his 2013 book, Presidential Term Limits in American History.

The nation’s third president, who was not far removed from first-hand experience with a power-hungry tyrant, wrote in his autobiography in 1821 that he hoped the citizens of the newly minted United States would keep recent history in mind as they selected their leaders.

“Should a President consent to be a candidate for a [third] election, I trust he would be rejected on this demonstration of ambitious views,” he wrote.

Roosevelt, of course, was not rejected by voters when he bucked tradition, getting elected four consecutive times. But when he died in office in 1945 at the start of his fourth term, Americans decided to prevent his legacy from creating a slippery slope by amending the Constitution to make the two-term limit official.

The official language of the 22nd Amendment prevents using a national crisis as justification for remaining in office, simply stating, “No person shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

Additionally, “no person who has held the office of President, or acted as President, for more than two years of a term to which some other person was elected President shall be elected to the office of the President more than once.” This provision is for the case of a vice president who serves out the majority of a four-year term following a president’s death or resignation.

As Congress debated the amendment, many argued the same case as the Founding Fathers: that putting term limits on a U.S. president prevents “a definite step in the direction of autocracy,” as West Virginia Sen. Chapman Revercomb put it.

Ohio Rep. Edward McCowen agreed, saying that the 22nd Amendment would be “a great step toward preventing a dictatorship or some totalitarian form of government from arising.”

The amendment passed Congress on March 21, 1947. It was ratified by the necessary three-fourths of the states and officially made law on Feb. 27, 1951.

Despite the fact that the Constitution explicitly forbids it, President Donald Trump has frequently floated the idea of running for a third term as president, even going so far as to add “TRUMP 2028” hats to the White House gift shop only a few months into his second term.

In March, during a phone interview with NBC News, Trump insisted he was “not joking” about considering a third term.

“A lot of people want me to do it,” he said at the time. “I basically tell them we have a long way to go, you know, it’s very early in the administration.”

Trump, who will be the oldest president in U.S. history by the time his second term ends in January 2029, also said during the interview that there are “methods” by which he could subvert the rules and serve a third term.

He didn’t expand on the “methods” by which he could serve a third term, but Trump supporters have proposed a few different possibilities.

The most straightforward would be amending the Constitution, either by a two-thirds vote in Congress or by two-thirds of U.S. states agreeing to call a constitutional convention to propose the changes — both of which are considered highly unlikely.

Another method would entail Vice President JD Vance winning the 2028 presidential election on a Vance-Trump ticket and then resigning so that Trump succeeds him. Similar chatter has emerged during past election years since the dawn of the 22nd Amendment, but usually in a more light-hearted nature.

“That talk never was all that serious,” said Brian Kalt, a Michigan State University professor who has written about the so-called “loophole,” in conversation with NPR.

“But in a certain situation where the president is sort of more popular than the common understanding of the Constitution, you better believe people will jump all over any loophole they can and allow that person to flout term limits,” Kalt continued. “And we’ve seen it in other countries. Everywhere there are term limits, there are vulnerabilities.”

Some — including Trump himself, while joking with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy — have alternatively proposed that the president could postpone an election under wartime circumstances, though legal experts have widely agreed that the president lacks that authority.

“There is no wiggle room [on the 22nd Amendment],” William Baude, who leads the Constitutional Law Institute at the University of Chicago Law School, told NPR. “That’s a clear statement of the Constitution, and I don’t think any serious person is going to interpret it otherwise.”

“If Trump announced, I’m canceling the elections, that has as much power as my announcing I’m canceling the elections,” Justin Levitt, a constitutional law professor at Loyola Marymount University, told The Associated Press.

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Still, several of Trump’s political allies have spoken publicly about the possibility of him serving another term. Three days after the president was sworn into office for a second time, Tennessee Rep. Andy Ogles introduced a House Joint Resolution to amend the Constitution and allow for a third term, as long as they’re not all consecutive.

South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham went on Fox News in September and said, “Trump 2028. I hope this never ends.”

In a March interview with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation, Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon said he was “working on” ideas to get the president elected again.

“I think we’ll have a couple of alternatives,” Bannon said. “We’ll see what the definition of term limit is.”

“I’m a firm believer that President Trump will run and win again in 2028,” he added. “We’ve had greater long shots than Trump 2028.”