Americans Have Always Argued About Presidential Term Limits

BY JEFFREY ROSEN

Trump’s talk about a possible third term highlights a debate that stretches from Jefferson and Hamilton to the presidential ambitions of both Roosevelts.

At the end of October, on Air Force One, President Trump mused about the possibility of seeking a third term. “Am I not ruling it out? I mean you’ll have to tell me.” Trump has refused throughout 2025 to rule out the possibility of seeking a third term, confirming in August that he and his staff had discussed the possibilities of “ loopholes” to the Twenty-Second Amendment to the Constitution, which says “no one shall be elected to the office of the President more than twice.”

But Trump seemed to reverse himself this week. He acknowledged that the Constitution forbids a third term: “I would say that if you read it, it’s pretty clear, I’m not allowed to run.”

Controversy over presidential term limits is nothing new in American politics. It was a heated point of contention among the Founders and remained a live issue well into the modern era, when progressive champions like Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt rejected talk of stepping down.

The great fear of the Founders was that the president would become a dictator, refusing to leave office after his term expired. At a dinner at his home in April 1791, Thomas Jefferson convened the rest of President Washington’s cabinet for a convivial working meal. At some point in the evening, according to Jefferson, Hamilton exclaimed, “the greatest man…that ever lived was Julius Caesar.” The comment convinced Jefferson that Hamilton was “honest as a man, but, as a politician, believing in the necessity of either force or corruption to govern men.”

Jefferson proceeded to found the Democratic-Republican Party in order to resist the alleged dictatorial ambitions of Hamilton and the Federalists. Jefferson’s study of ancient history had convinced him that all “elective monarchies” had ended with popular leaders like Caesar converting themselves into hereditary despots.

He was especially concerned that a future president might lose a bid for re-election by a few votes and falsely insist that the election had been stolen. “If once elected, and at a second or third election outvoted by one or two votes, he will pretend false votes, foul play, hold possession of the reins of government, be supported by the states voting for him,” Jefferson wrote to Madison after receiving a copy of the proposed Constitution in 1787. Jefferson’s suggested remedy for the problem was a one-term limit for the presidency, “an incapacity to be elected a second time.”

Hamilton’s solution was the opposite of Jefferson’s. He thought a life term for the president would free him to pursue the public interest rather than flattering the people to advance his own ambitions. At the Constitutional Convention, he proposed a life term for the presidency “during good behavior,” and this idea was entertained, at various times, by delegates including James Madison and Gouverneur Morris.

In the end, Hamilton made his peace with the Convention’s decision to give the president a four-year term, with no limit on how many terms he could serve. In Federalist No. 72, he argued that a president who was prevented from running for re-election would lose the incentive to behave well during his term and might cling to power illegally.

After serving two terms as President, George Washington voluntarily relinquished power by choosing, like the Roman statesman Cincinnatus, to return to his farm. In fact, Washington opposed term limits for presidents and stepped down for personal reasons. It was Jefferson’s decision to step down in 1808 that firmly established the two-term tradition. And for nearly 70 years, the two-term tradition held firm.

In 1875, after the Civil War, supporters of President Ulysses S. Grant called on him to seek a third term. Grant hedged his bets by emphasizing that, like Washington, he did not believe the two-term tradition could be enforced without a constitutional amendment. Congress responded by passing a resolution proposed by Rep. William Springer, an Illinois Democrat, defending the two-term tradition on the grounds that “any departure from this time-honored custom would be unwise, unpatriotic and fraught with peril to our free institutions.” But the resolution failed to quash Grant’s interest in a third term, and in 1880, he briefly led the Republican field before being defeated at the convention by James Garfield.

The first president to be nominated for a third term was Theodore Roosevelt. After succeeding to the presidency when William McKinley was assassinated in 1901, and winning re-election in 1904, he promised not to seek a third term. “Under no circumstances will I be a candidate for or accept another nomination,” he said. But Roosevelt soon came to regret his rash statement and, in 1912, challenged his handpicked successor, William Howard Taft, by running as a candidate for the newly formed Progressive Party.

The next president to run for a third term was also a Roosevelt, but FDR succeeded in 1940 where TR had failed in 1912. Long before he ran for a third term, Roosevelt had been attacked as an aspiring dictator, the fulfillment of the Founders’ fears of a Caesar. But after arranging to be “drafted” by the Democratic Convention in 1940, he claimed that he lay up at night reflecting that he couldn’t ask servicemen and women to serve their country during World War II and decline to serve himself.

Despite his opponent’s warning that “This is the way democracy has been destroyed,” Roosevelt won a third term in 1940 and a fourth in 1944. Exhausted and sick, he died in

The great fear of the Founders was that a president would refuse to leave office.

April 1945, only 82 days after the start of his fourth term. After winning both houses of Congress in 1946, Republicans introduced various drafts of a constitutional amendment to prevent future presidents from extending their time in office.

Supporters of what became the Twenty-Second Amendment invoked Jefferson’s support of term limits and said they were necessary “to prevent the possible rise of a dictator in this country,” as Sen. Hugh Butler, a Nebraska Republican, put it. Opponents of term limits quoted Hamilton in the Federalist Papers on why presidential term limits would risk instability in times of crisis. In the end, Southern Democrats sided with Northern Republicans in proposing the Twenty-Second Amendment in 1947, and it was ratified in February 1951.

Now that the Constitution forbids presidents from being elected “more than twice,” the loopholes aren’t obvious. One possibility is for a president who has served two terms to be elected as vice president and then succeed to a third term when his running mate resigns. President Trump has called this plan too “cute” and it’s not clear whether it’s allowed by the Twelfth Amendment, which sets out the voting process for president and vice president.

Of course, as Hamilton and Jefferson feared, a dictatorial president determined to extend his power is unlikely to be constrained by constitutional niceties. That’s why Harry Truman insisted that the two-term tradition could only be restored by presidential self-restraint. “I know I could be elected again and continue to break the old precedent as it was broken by FDR,” Harry Truman wrote in 1950. “It should not be done. That precedent should continue—not by a Constitutional Amendment but by custom based on the honor of the man in the office.” Jeffrey Rosen is president and CEO of the National Constitution Center. His new book is “The Pursuit of Liberty: How Hamilton vs. Jefferson Ignited the Lasting Battle Over Power in America.”