When President Donald Trump told NBC News he was “not joking” about a third term, he wasn’t floating a trial balloon; he was announcing the next phase in Project 2025’s 900+ page plan to destroy constitutional constraints.
It won’t be that hard to achieve. The constitutional “methods” Trump casually referenced is actually brutally simple arithmetic. He already has the two-thirds of a Republican-dominated Congress necessary to rip the 22nd Amendment to shreds with terrifying efficiency. Same with securing three-fourths of Republican-dominated state legislature. And voilà—America’s chief constitutional bulwark against autocracy dissolves.
For those who, against all evidence to the contrary, dismiss these ambitions as mere delusions, that’s exactly what the British Empire—the mightiest global force of its day—said when 13 fractious colonies issued the Declaration of Independence almost 250 years ago this July. The British didn’t dignify it as a “revolution;” they dismissed it as a “rebellion.” It took Washington eight bloody years before they accepted the new reality—the exact number of years it’ll take Trump, if he makes it to a third term, to end the American experiment.
The nation’s leading scholars of fascism see it. That’s why they’re abandoning American universities for positions in Canada and Europe. They recognize what’s unfolding with clinical precision. Their exodus leaves behind a populace that, like in the Weimar Republic, dismisses each authoritarian advance as temporary, necessary—or even more astonishing, somehow contained.
At first, term limits were a precedent, but they weren’t codified. George Washington, the subject of my last book, left office after two terms because, in part, he believed that America should never be dependent on one man; there would be no king, religious leader, military dictator, or despot. The only reason to stay in power would be for power’s sake—which is exactly what he warned us about in his Farewell Address.
The Founders weren’t superhuman predictors of the future, but they sometimes sound like it. “The danger is that the indulgence and attachments of the people will keep a man in the chair after he becomes a dotard,” Thomas Jefferson wrote in 1805, “that reelection through life shall become habitual, and election for life follow that.”
Trump will be older than Joe Biden was at the end of his second term, the oldest president in American history, and it’ll show—more than it already does. But the stability we felt during Biden’s diminished state was in part thanks to the people he deputized. Three months in, Signalgate is just one of many signs that’s not a luxury this administration will afford us. A third term will surely leave us with JD Vance’s iteration of Elon Musk–Peter Thiel’s technological surveillance state. At best.
Today’s enabling class transcends familiar political boundaries—a bizarre pantheon of economically anxious voters, “family values” crusaders, Second Amendment absolutists, cryptocurrency evangelists, anti-vaccine wellness influencers, and historical revisionists who applaud the whitewashing of America’s racial past. They’re united only by their willingness to trade democratic norms for sectarian victories. Washington warned us about this, too, in lines he maddeningly cut from his Farewell Address: “Partial combinations of men, who though not in Office, from birth, riches or other sources of distinction, have extraordinary influence & numerous adherents” would subvert the very foundations of the republic, Washington warned. They fail to recognize that their incremental “wins” follow, with mechanical precision, the blueprint used by history’s most effective autocrats. The mortgage on tyranny comes due after all the papers are signed—and by then, the property has already been foreclosed.
Let’s remember why the 22nd Amendment exists. Even Franklin Roosevelt—a president who won four elections while defeating fascism abroad—alarmed Americans enough to codify presidential term limits after his death. This country recognized that even good men with noble causes shouldn’t be the exception. Trump has no world war to win, yet hungers for the emergency powers such crises provide. He demands national unity while systematically degrading at least half the country’s population—a fundamental contradiction that reveals his authoritarian instincts.
The Founders understood what we’ve forgotten—constitutions don’t enforce themselves. When Washington voluntarily relinquished power after the revolution, King George III reportedly remarked, “If true, then he is the greatest man in the world.” Washington’s greatest legacy wasn’t military victory but voluntary retirement—just as Trump’s will be failing to evade it. Whether it’ll be once or twice depends on us.
