President’s Third Term Talk Defies Constitution and Tests Democracy

The 22nd Amendment is clear: President Trump has to give up his office after his second term. But his refusal to accept that underscores how far he is willing to consider going to consolidate power.

After President Trump said last year that he wanted to be a dictator for a day, he insisted that he was only joking. Now he is saying that he may try to hold onto power even after the Constitution stipulates that he must give it up, and this time he insists he is not joking.

Maybe he is and maybe he isn’t. Mr. Trump loves stirring the pot and getting a rise out of critics. Talk of an unconstitutional third term distracts from other news and delays the day he is seen as a lame duck. Certainly some in his own camp consider it a joke as Republican leaders laugh it off and White House aides mock reporters for taking it too seriously.

But the fact that Mr. Trump has inserted the idea into the national conversation illustrates the uncertainty about the future of America’s constitutional system, nearly 250 years after the country gained independence. More than at any time in generations, a president’s commitment to limits on power and the rule of law is under question and his critics fear that the country is on a dark path.

After all, Mr. Trump already tried once to hold onto power in defiance of the Constitution when he sought to overturn the 2020 election despite losing. He later called for “termination” of the Constitution to return himself to the White House without a new election. And in the 11 weeks since he resumed office, he has pressed the boundaries of executive power more than any of his modern predecessors.

“This is in my mind a culmination of what he has already started, which is a methodical effort to destabilize and undermine our democracy so that he can assume much greater power,” Representative Daniel Goldman, Democrat of New York and lead counsel during Mr. Trump’s first impeachment, said in an interview.

“A lot of people are not talking about it because it’s not the most pressing issue of that particular day,” he said on Friday as stock markets were plunging in reaction to Mr. Trump’s newly declared trade war. But an attack on democracy, he added, “is actually in motion and people need to recognize that it is not hypothetical or speculative anymore.”