When Republicans took control of Congress in 1947, they were still angry that President Franklin D. Roosevelt had won a fourth term in 1944, and they set out to pass a constitutional amendment to limit future presidents to two terms. John Jennings, Republican of Tennessee, stood on the House floor and said a 22nd Amendment was necessary to prevent a dictator from taking over the country.
“Without such a limit on the number of terms a man may serve in the presidency, the time may come when a man of vaulting ambition becomes president,” Mr. Jennings said on Feb. 6, 1947. Such a man, backed by a “subservient Congress” and a compliant Supreme Court, could “sweep aside and overthrow the safeguards of the Constitution,” he said. Without such a law, a president could use the office’s great powers to tilt the political system in his favor and win repeated re-election. Eventually, that president could come to resemble a king, effectively unbound by the Constitution’s checks and balances.
In the decades after the country ratified the 22nd Amendment in 1951, members of both parties occasionally chafed against its restrictions, but no sitting president openly talked about evading it — until recently. Mr. Jennings’s warning on the House floor now looks prophetic: President Trump is a man of vaulting ambition. Congress is largely subservient to his agenda. And he keeps mentioning the idea of a third term.
“I suspect I won’t be running again unless you say, ‘He’s so good, we’ve got to figure something else out,’” he said shortly after being re-elected last November. Though Republicans in the room chuckled at the time, he said in March that he was “not joking” and that “there are methods which you could do it.”
This past weekend, he seemed to both step back from the idea and reiterate it. “It’s something that, to the best of my knowledge, you’re not allowed to do,” Mr. Trump told NBC News. But then he once again claimed that the decision was his to make. “Well, there are ways of doing it,” he said. All the while, his website continues to sell “Trump 2028” merchandise, including baseball caps for $50 apiece and $36 T-shirts that proclaim, “Rewrite the rules.”
It may be that this talk is mostly a tactical attempt to ward off the stigma of being a lame duck. Congressional Republicans have responded partly by gently disagreeing and partly by downplaying the idea as a joke. “Not without a change in the Constitution,” Senator John Thune, the majority leader, told reporters in March. He added, “I think that you guys keep asking the question, and I think he’s probably having some fun with it, probably messing with you.”
